July 2015
Doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, Elaine LaFay, was the first speaker to kick-off the round-tables at the workshop Tropical Diseases in Latin America and the Caribbean: A Historical Perspective hosted by Fiocruz on 1-3 July.
LaFay introduced her paper Belonging in the Tropical Borderlands: Yellow Fever, Environment and Nationalism in Florida, 1825-1860. She explained how US physicians and residents living in the volatile, newly acquired state of Florida in the mid-19th century debated the extent to which its climate was tropical. In their optic, Florida existed in a geography that spiraled southward, into the Caribbean, rather than deeper into the continent. According to the researcher, cutting across the state was an understanding of the landscape as a lush, bountiful, restorative place that was simultaneously barren and lethal. “Yellow fever epidemics existed at the heart of this seemingly bizarre contradiction as direct subversions of the social, racial, and medical order”, reveals LaFay.
But the conflicting accounts of health in Florida reveal boarder anxieties about belonging and ownership. “As patients flocked to the state, they appraised the landscape with eyes and bodies attuned to the political and cultural meaning of health and disease”, she explains. According to the author, these assessments reveal an important tenor of identity in the antebellum Gulf: threats to white bodies, especially yellow fever epidemics, were understood as part and parcel of the overlapping racial and imperial parts of the state, and hopes for a cure partially resided in the increased settlement of white Americans. The research contextualizes outbreaks of ‘tropical fevers’, especially yellow fever, within the highly charged US attempt to establish control over both the Florida landscape and its native peoples, showing how epidemics underscored the fault lines of the fragile US hold on the region.
By studying these trends in a ‘tropical borderland’, the research shows how the popular and professional assessments of the region raise questions about multitiered meanings of tropicality and cultural understandings of yellow fever and other tropical diseases at the time. “Ultimately, these questions underscore the political and cultural ambivalence about the southeastern US boderlands at the edges of the tropical world”, observes LaFay.
See related articles in HCS-Manguinhos:
Tropical medicine in the 19th and 20th centuries. Editor’s note of HCS-Manguinhos (vol.21, no.2, Apr./Jun. 2014) by Jaime Benchimol.