Best regards, Andrew Stewart
Begin forwarded message: > From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW <[email protected]> > Date: November 21, 2020 at 8:09:58 PM EST > To: [email protected] > Cc: H-Net Staff <[email protected]> > Subject: H-Net Review [H-Africa]: Hoppe on Kotar and Gessler, 'Yellow > Fever: A Worldwide History' > Reply-To: [email protected] > > S. L. Kotar, J. E. Gessler. Yellow Fever: A Worldwide History. > Jefferson McFarland & Company, 2017. Illustrations, maps. 456 > pp. $45.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-7864-7919-1. > > Reviewed by Kirk A. Hoppe (University of Illinois at Chicago) > Published on H-Africa (November, 2020) > Commissioned by David D. Hurlbut > > This is a challenging book to categorize and describe. It is not an > academic monograph or a coffee-table book. Perhaps it lies somewhere > between popular history and a reference book. The majority of the > thirty-four chapters are between five and fifteen pages long with > numerous black-and-white reproductions of historical maps, statistics > of cases and deaths, photographs, newspaper story headlines, and > advertisements for yellow fever cures drawn from an impressive > bibliography of five hundred newspapers and magazines. Many of these > reproductions seem randomly placed. Chapter 24, "Falling Like > Leaves," which is about yellow fever epidemics in the 1870s, for > example, includes a photograph of incoming passengers at the Miami > airport in the 1950s having their temperatures taken (p. 290). Some > of the historical disease broadsheets and cure advertisements are > fascinating documents, but the authors provide little context or > analysis. > > This work is chronological and episodic. After a brief introduction, > the first eight chapters and 100 pages cover the eighteenth century > by decade. The next 150 pages cover the nineteenth century in a > similar way. The chapters go wherever yellow fever outbreaks in that > decade occurred but dwell primarily in the United States and northern > Atlantic. While the overview is worldwide, relying on published > primary sources in English limits the authors to histories of the US > and western Europe and to when and where white men go in the > Caribbean and Panama for commerce and plunder. Most chapters are > about the US South and Eastern Seaboard: three chapters on the 1793 > Philadelphia epidemic and six on nineteenth-century New Orleans. > > The chapters move quickly from one location to the next. Chapter 22, > "I am 'Writing from the City of the Dead': Yellow Fever around the > World during the 1860s," begins in the Caribbean; then moves to one > page on Africa, half a page on Russia, and a page and a half on > England; and concludes with four pages on international theories on > cures and quarantines. The authors do not organize the material > through any central arguments or theoretical lenses, nor do they give > a sense of geographic relationships. > > Before discussing germ theory at the turn of the twentieth century > and the identification of the mosquito vector, S. L. Kotar and J. E. > Gessler present ongoing confusion, guess work, blame, panic, urban > outmigrations by the wealthy (with interesting parallels to our > current pandemic), fake cures, and ships in quarantine. Amid these > topics, they also include some interesting historical conversations > about whether or not yellow fever was contagious and whether > quarantines were effective or legitimate. But the authors only touch > on these episodically as they appear in a decade. The germ theory > revolution is given scant attention in the final chapters of the > text. A lone woman, Clara Maass, appears in chapter 30. Her death > after experiments by Walter Reed on human volunteers in Cuba in 1901 > led to outrage in the US and the end of that medical study. But this > history begins and ends in one paragraph (p. 363). The authors do not > discuss gender. They mention race and class episodically but not as > topics of analysis. > > There is an odd concluding focus on the present-day threat of yellow > fever as a biological weapon and a more reasonable concern with the > _Aedes_ _aegypti _mosquito moving north with global warming. There is > also an odd contradiction in labeling this book as a worldwide study. > Yellow fever is historically endemic in South America and tropical > and subtropical Africa. The World Health Organization reports between > one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand yellow fever cases in > Africa annually, with tens of thousands of deaths. But Kotar and > Gessler give bare mention to histories of the disease in Africa and > South America. > > _Yellow Fever: A Worldwide History_ is a chronological compendium, > almost an index, of Anglo-European stories and sources. Many of these > stories have been fully told and richly analyzed in both academic and > popular histories from J. R. McNeill's brilliant _Mosquito Empires, > Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914_ (2010), Matthew > Parker's _Panama Fever: The Epic Story of the Building of the Panama > Canal_ (2008), Manuel Barcia's _The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting > Disease in the Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade_ (2020), > John Pierce's _Yellow Jack: How Yellow Fever Ravaged America and > Walter Reed Discovered Its Deadly Secrets_ (2005), and Renee Uzee's > _Yellow Jack: New Orleans History Revisited The Yellow Fever Epidemic > of 1853_ (2019), to Laurie Anderson's award-winning young adult > fiction about Philadelphia, _Fever 1793_ (2002). > > Citation: Kirk A. Hoppe. Review of Kotar, S. L.; Gessler, J. E., > _Yellow Fever: A Worldwide History_. H-Africa, H-Net Reviews. > November, 2020. > URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55351 > > This work is licensed under a Creative Commons > Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States > License. > > -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#3793): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/3793 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/78423806/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
