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

In this new and compelling intellectual history, Thomas Apel tracks the scientific and political responses to the yellow fever outbreaks that from 1793–1805 in American port cities took five thousand lives, almost ten percent of their populations. He reinterprets the significance of familiar contemporary investigators, including Benjamin Rush and Noah Webster, and uncovers new voices. Drawing on a wealth of material including many polemical essays, pamphlets, articles, press reports, and letters and diaries, Apel focuses on the controversy and debates surrounding yellow fever to open ‘‘an ideal window onto the contours of natural inquiry in the early republic’’ (5). The debates about what caused yellow fever and how to prevent it were linked to ideas about what constituted a healthy republic. Apel focuses on two sets of investigators, the localists and the contagionists, who ‘‘broke down into rival camps’’ as the yellow fever crisis developed (22). Though they studied the same facts they came to different conclusions, which is the core of Apel’s analysis. The localists, generally distinguished from contagionists by superior education and social standing, included most prominently, Benjamin Rush. They attributed the disease to miasmas arising from local conditions. The contagionists, who had usually learned medicine as apprentices and practiced as surgeons, maintained that the disease was imported from the West Indies and could be transmitted from person to person. While Apel repeatedly suggests that the contagionists were correct we now know that while yellow fever is certainly imported, it is not contagious between persons but transmitted via the Aedes aegypti mosquito. Situating his argument within the historian Andrew Lewis’s ‘‘democracy of facts,’’ Apel shows the difficulty surrounding these debates in the early republic: as investigators, independent of theory, collected facts observable to anyone, the deceptive etiology of the