Thomas Apel

Feverish Bodies, Enlightened Minds

Science and the Yellow Fever Controversy in the Early American Republic

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Feverish Bodies, Enlightened Minds considers the scientific controversy about the cause of yellow fever to examine and conduct of scientific practice in the early United States.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 208
• Erscheinungstermin: 30. März 2016
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 231mm x 152mm x 20mm
• Gewicht: 446g
• ISBN-13: 9780804797405
• ISBN-10: 0804797404
• Artikelnr.: 44382736

Autorenporträt

Thomas A. Apel teaches history at Menlo College.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction: Introduction
chapter abstract
The Introduction accentuates the depths of the problem of yellow fever, and
it situates Feverish Bodies, Enlightened Minds in the relevant
historiographies. Most works on yellow fever have focused on the
devastating epidemic of 1793 and depicted the dispute about its cause as a
familiar contest that pitted stale theories against each other. The
Introduction suggests that episode reveals much more about knowledge
construction than others have thought, and it argues specifically that the
yellow fever controversy reflected prevailing ideological concerns of early
republicans, including their concerns about political conflict, the
direction of the republic, and the sanctity of religion at a time of
turbulence.
1Contexts and Causes
chapter abstract
Chapter One frames the parameters of the debate and establishes the
prevailing intellectual orientation of the investigators. As scientists,
investigators cast themselves as the descendants of Bacon, and asserted the
importance of inductive reasoning and empirical evidence, which manifested
itself in the yellow fever debate as an eagerness for the "facts" of the
disease's occurrences. As pious Protestants, they rejected the perceived
excesses of empirical skepticism, which threatened to reduce nature to mere
mechanism and science to a cold, passionless pursuit. Investigators
celebrated "common sense," the God-given capacity of the mind that enabled
humans to sift through the scattered phenomena of nature and find truth.
Casting the issue of yellow fever as a matter of common sense, the
localists in particular came to view the debate not only as a scientific
question, but one that affected the integrity of their conceptions of
nature, the human mind, and God's purpose.
2"Declare the Past"
chapter abstract
Chapter Two considers the investigators' uses of history to determine the
cause of yellow fever. A vast repository of facts about disease, history
appealed to the investigators' desire to place disease inquiry on a firm
empirical footing. The historical turn culminated in two massive works on
the history of disease published almost simultaneously in 1799: theTreatise
on the Plague and Yellow Feverby the contagionist James Tytler, and
theBrief History of Epidemic and Pestilential Diseasesby the localist Noah
Webster. Whereas Tytler's work was roundly rejected by investigators,
Webster'sBrief Historycogently situated the yellow fever epidemics in the
sweep of history. But the localist victory was a Pyrrhic one.The appeal to
the past exposed problems that undermined investigators' hopes that history
could serve as an empirical basis of disease inquiry and it forced early
republicans to reckon with their precarious places in the cycles of time.
3"Nature is the Great Experimenter"
chapter abstract
Chapter Three examines the investigators' uses of the new chemistry of
Antoine Laurent Lavoisier. Lavoisier's "chemical revolution" produced a
Kuhnian paradigm shift that fundamentally altered scientists' conceptions
of the elemental construction of matter. Investigators' used it to identify
the chemical constitution of the particles that caused yellow fever, but
not as their French creators had intended. During an period of war and
revolution, investigators' were troubled by the very Frenchness of
Lavoisier's chemistry, and they utterly rejected the experimental programme
of the French for its basis in heretical doctrines. Celebrating the common
sense capacities of the mind, chemists produced fanciful, reverential, and
highly theoretical theories about the chemical origins of yellow fever,
which anticipated strains of Romanticism in American science. Again,
chemistry redounded to the benefit of the localists who used the science to
construct plausible theories about the chemical identity of the miasmas
that brought on the disease.
4"Let Not God Intervene"
chapter abstract
Chapter Four considers the natural theology of yellow fever. Convinced that
yellow fever appeared as a punishment for sins and that the disease arose
from natural processes, the investigators sought to interpret the purpose
of yellow fever from the evidence of design. The localists found an elegant
compromise. By negligently and carelessly allowing filth to accumulate,
they argued, city-dwellers of afflicted cities violated both scriptural and
common-sense prohibitions against uncleanliness, setting in motion a chain
of events that naturally produced yellow fever. Localists embarked on a
vigorous public health campaign, through which they stressed the duties of
all Americans, as citizens of the republic and subjects of God, to abide by
sanitary regulations. Considering the natural theology of yellow fever,
however, reinforced republican fears of cities and further disillusioned
early republicans about the direction of the American nation.
5"In Politics as well as Medicine"; Or, The Arrogance of the Enlightened
chapter abstract
Chapter Five examines the tenor of the debate, especially its
conspiratorial tone. Participants on both sides of the debate cast
themselves as victims of the persecutions of their opponents, who had
conspired to subvert the truth. The fever discourse thus mirrored the
well-known "paranoid style" of contemporary political discourse. These
parallel discourses were mutually reinforcing and both were rooted at least
in part in the similar material organizations of early republican
discursive communities. This chapter also argues that common sense
epistemology itself provoked intolerance. For if truths about nature or
politics offered themselves to common sense, then those who differed were
not merely incorrect, but dangerously wayward and probably ill-intentioned.
The vitriol of the yellow fever debate left investigators wanting to exert
greater top-down control over the course of natural inquiry, just as the
bitterness of the1790s political wars left intellectuals wanting to contain
political discourse.
Conclusion: Conclusion
chapter abstract
The Conclusion suggests that the yellow fever debate revealed the
untenability of scientific inquiry based on the common-sense model, which
could not sustain productive debate. It also contends that the yellow fever
years help explain the trajectory of American science and medicine in the
nineteenth century, when natural inquiry began to move out of the public
sphere and into professional organizations and institutions of "experts."
In medicine, this tendency crystallized in the rise of hospitals and
autopsy, and in the search for disease in the tissues of the body. The
debate between localists and contagionists reappeared in American South in
response to its own yellow fever epidemics and in the United States'
industrial cities in response to cholera, but these investigators would be
inclined to look for answers in the bodies and corpses of their patients,
as much as in ships and putrid effluvia.