Feverish Bodies, Enlightened Minds: Science and the Yellow Fever Controversy in the Early American Republic by Thomas A. Apel (review)

In this new monograph, Thomas A. Apel provides a compelling examination of the intellectual controversy surrounding outbreaks of yellow fever in the northeastern United States at the turn of the nineteenth century. As well as an account of the "yellow fever controversy," Apel unpacks the debate's broader cultural and intellectual underpinnings. At the center of the discourse on yellow fever, Apel demonstrates, were well-known physicians such as Benjamin Rush and Samuel L. Mitchill, who wrestled with broader streams in Enlightenment thought, including the influence of materialism, conspiratorial fears of political factions in the new American republic, the chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, and history's role in understanding the natural world. Through chapters organized around these themes, Apel teases out the deeper intellectual anxieties present in the debate over the origins of yellow fever.

In chapter one, Apel establishes the terms of the debate: did yellow fever spring from local causes or was it imported? University-trained physicians such as Benjamin Rush and Samuel L. Mitchill led the localists, who ultimately won the debate, while surgeons such as William Currie and Isaac Cathrall acted as spokespeople for the contagionists. Rush and other localists, noting that yellow fever seemed to strike only swampy ports, reasoned that yellow fever was produced from the local environment. In contrast, contagionists concluded that since yellow fever outbreaks followed the arrival of diseased ships, the only observable solution was that it had been imported. In short, localists saw a common sense connection between places and epidemics, while contagionists championed their theory due to the coincidence of diseased ships and cases of yellow fever.

In the next two chapters Apel enriches what is otherwise a familiar narrative, uncovering how contagionists and localists used history and chemistry to undergird their theories of yellow fever's origins. Contagionists created historical narratives of shipping patterns and occurrences of the virus around the world. Localists, however, contended that contagion allowed for no point of origin, an infinite regress. They instead argued that history proved that certain climatic and geographic traits spawned yellow fever. Localists and contagionists reached a similar stalemate through their use of chemistry. Localists embraced the general depiction of the natural world created by Lavoisier's chemistry, but they rarely adopted Lavoisier's commitment to experimental methods. Instead, Apel explains, localists "relied on logical deductions, imaginative leaps, and syntheses of past research" (67). Even though contagionists employed experimental methods more readily, the results supported neither contagion nor miasmatic explanations, unsurprising given the virus's etiology. In these chapters, Apel makes great strides in connecting medical theory to broader streams in Atlantic science. The yellow fever controversy transcended its limited topic and spoke to early republican thinkers' diverse conceptions of the natural world.

In the last two chapters, Apel examines the yellow fever controversy as a battle ground over religion and politics, both of which were not seen as inherently in conflict with science. On moral grounds, localists blamed the supposed vice of poor urbanites for unclean cities, yellow fever, and the republic's allegedly waning virtue. As Apel asserts, "The problem of yellow fever raised the specter of urban multitudes run amok, the classic fear of republicanism" (110). Similarly, apprehension about unfettered freedom of speech infested contemporary political debate. In particular, localists were paranoid that contagionists constituted a faction, who, in collusion with the popular press, were waging a war of words against the truth of yellow fever's local origins. Specifically, localists feared the free dissemination of information without their enlightened curation. Finally, the debate over yellow fever represented a dispute, Apel contends, over the nature of the American economy. Contagionists drew attention to the potential danger of America's burgeoning commercial culture, whereas Rush and the localists understood commerce to be the lifeblood of the young republic. In many...