Making Yellow Fever American: America, Great Britain and the Transatlantic Travails of Yellow Fever, 1793-1810

Katherine Arner

Around the turn of the nineteenth century, yellow fever delivered a series of deadly blows in North America and parts of the Caribbean.  The outbreaks unleashed an impassioned debate over the nature of the disease within the British Empire and United States.  Historians have long conceived of ideas about yellow fever as emerging and circulating within national or imperial geopolitical boundaries.  This paper revises that outlook.  Through an analysis of American and British medical treatises, medical journals, newspaper pieces and correspondence, I argue that transnational links in science and medicine played a critical role in shaping how actors on both sides of the Atlantic interpreted an unfamiliar disease.

While focused on yellow fever, my study has two larger goals.  It reveals the ways in which the web of transatlantic networks in the eighteenth century shaped ideas about diseases and their local settings.  It also poses larger questions about the intersections between the circulation of disease research and the shifting geopolitical order in the late eighteenth-century Atlantic sphere.

[WP #0902]