Abstract
From 1900 to the 1940s, the United States spearheaded an international campaign against yellow fever, channeling massive resources and sanitary know-how into the eradication of the mosquito vectors of this viral disease, their larvae, and the standing water in which they copiously bred. For the most part, this crusade unfolded in Latin America and the Caribbean and, as such, was an integral facet of expanding US scientific and cultural hemispheric dominance in the Americas. In 1900, US physicians conducted a series of experiments in Cuba that conclusively demonstrated that yellow fever was not transmitted via the air nor through infected bedding and clothing but via the female Aedes aegypti (initially called the Stegomyia fasciata) mosquito. These findings furnished the basis for a top-down mosquito control effort in Havana, a city occupied by US military and sanitary forces in the wake of the 1898 Spanish-American War. The successes of this operation, which reduced yellow fever deaths to zero in under one year, were transferred to the Panama Canal in 1904, when the United States gained possession of this Central American isthmus in order to build a transoceanic waterway. And after the Canal was opened in 1914, the United States was sufficiently concerned about the threat of disruptive diseases spreading out from this new geographical opening to embark on a major yellow fever eradication campaign that lasted for over 20 years and expended nearly 6 million dollars.1
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Notes
M. Cueto, ‘The Cycles of Eradication: the Rockefeller Foundation and Latin American Public Health, 1918–1940’, in P. Weindling (ed.) International health organizations and movements, 1918–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 222–43.
For a superb discussion of this phenomenon see R. Salvatore, ‘The Enterprise of Knowledge: Representational Machines of Informal Empire’, in G.M. Joseph, C.C. LeGrand and R.D. Salvatore (eds), Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of US-Latin America Relations (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 69–106.
See, for example J. Farley, Bilharzia: A History of Imperial Tropical Medicine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991);
M. Worboys, ‘Tropical Diseases’, in W.F. Bynum and R. Porter (eds), Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine, vol. 1 (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 512–36; D. Arnold, ‘Medicine and Colonialism’, in Bynum and Porter (eds), Companion Encyclopedia, pp. 1393–416;
A. Bashford, Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health (London: Palgrave, 2004).
See W. Anderson, ‘Immunities of Empire: Race, Disease, and the New Tropical Medicine, 1900–1920’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 70 (1996): 94–118;
A. Spielman and M. D’Antonio, Mosquito: The Story of Man’s Deadliest Foe (New York: Hyperion, 2001).
See M.D. Gorgas and B.J. Hendrick, William Crawford Gorgas: His Life and Work (New York: Doubleday, 1924).
See J. Duffy, The Sanitarians: A History of American Public Health (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1992).
M. Humphreys, Yellow Fever and the South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992);
J.H. Ellis, Yellow Fever and Public Health in the New South (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1992).
See N. Stepan, ‘The Interplay between Socio-Economic Factors and Medical Science: Yellow Fever Research, Cuba and the United States’, Social Studies of Science, 8 (1978): 397–423;
for an excellent account of the Reed Commission experts see A.E. Truby, Memoir of Walter Reed: The Yellow Fever Episode (New York: Paul B. Hoeber, 1943).
See the articles: W. Reed, J. Carroll, A. Agramonte and J. Lazear, ‘The Etiology of Yellow Fever — A Preliminary Note’, Proceedings of the Twenty-eighth Annual Meeting of the American Public Health Association in Indianapolis, 22–26 October 1900; W. Reed, J. Carroll and A. Agramonte, ‘The Etiology of Yellow Fever: An Additional Note’, Proceedings of the Pan-American Medical Congress in Havana, 4–7 February 1901; W. Reed, J. Carroll and A. Agramonte, ‘Experimental Yellow Fever’, American Medicine, 6 July 1901: 15–23; W. Reed and J. Carroll, ‘The Etiology of Yellow Fever: A Supplemental Note’, American Medicine, 22 February 1902, pp. 301–5; on French colonial medicine and yellow fever research in Brazil see I. Löwy, ‘Yellow Fever in Rio de Janeiro and the Pasteur Institute Mission (1901–1905): the Transfer of Science to the Periphery’, Medical History, 34 (1990): 144–63.
See D.M. Haynes, Imperial Medicine: Patrick Manson and the Conquest of Tropical Disease (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001).
D. McCullough, The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870–1914 (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1977), p. 418.
See N.L. Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001).
W.C. Gorgas, ‘Sanitation on the Canal Zone’, Journal of the American Medical Association, 60 (29 March 1913): 954.
See M.L. Conniff, Panama and the United States: The Forced Alliance (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992);
J. Lindsay-Poland, Emperors in the Jungle: The Hidden History of the US in Panama (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
M.L. Conniff, Black Labor on a White Canal, Panama, 1904–1981 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985); also see P. Sutter, ‘“Pulling the Teeth of the Tropics”: Environment, Disease, Race, and the US Sanitary Program in Panama, 1904–1914’, unpublished manuscript in author’s possession.
Quoted in J.A. LePrince and A.J. Orenstein, Mosquito Control in Panama: The Eradication of Malaria and Yellow Fever in Cuba and Panama (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1916), p. 272.
Isthmian Canal Commission, Laws of the Canal Zone Isthmus of Panama (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1906).
W.C. Gorgas, Sanitation in Panama (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1915), p. 147.
W.C. Gorgas, ‘Annual Report of the Department of Health of the Isthmian Canal Commission for the Year 1906’ (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1907).
W.C. Gorgas, ‘Recent Experiences of the United States Army with Regard to Sanitation of Yellow Fever in the Tropics’, Journal of Tropical Medicine, 6 (February 1903): 49–52.
See W. Anderson, ‘“Where Every Prospect Pleases and Only Man in Vile”: Laboratory Medicine as Colonial Discourse’, in V.L. Rafael (ed.), Discrepant Histories: Translocal Essays on Filipino Cultures (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), pp. 83–112;
W. Anderson, ‘Excremental Colonialism: Public Health and the Poetics of Pollution’, Critical Inquiry, 21 (1995): 640–69; R. Ileto, ‘Cholera and the Origins of the American Sanitary Order’, in Rafael, Discrepant Histories, pp. 51–81;
M. Tapper, ‘Interrogating Bodies: Medico-Racial Knowledge, Politics, and the Study of a Disease’, Comparative Study of Studies in Society and History, 37 (1995): 76–93.
R. Ross, Mosquito Brigades and How to Organize Them (New York City: Longmans, Green and Co., 1902), p. 50.
W.G. Baetz, ‘Syphilis in Colored Canal Laborers — A Resume of 500 Consecutive Medical Cases’, Proceedings of the Medical Association of the Isthmian Canal Zone, Vol. VII, Part 1 (Mount Hope, C.Z.: Panama Canal Press, 1916), pp. 17–33.
See Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modem America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), chapter 1.
For the best discussion of the limits of the eradication model see M. Cueto, ‘Sanitation from Above: Yellow Fever and Foreign Intervention in Peru, 1919–1922’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 72 (1992): 1–22.
Rockefeller Foundation (RF), International Health Board (IHB), Annual Report, 1921, p. 133.
J. Farley, To Cast out Disease: A History of the International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation (1913–1951) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 92.
D.B. Cooper and K.F. Kiple, ‘Yellow Fever’, in Kiple (ed.), The Cambridge World History of Disease (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 1100–7.
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Stern, A.M. (2007). Yellow Fever Crusade: US Colonialism, Tropical Medicine, and the International Politics of Mosquito Control, 1900–1920. In: Bashford, A. (eds) Medicine at the Border. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230288904_3
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