Urmi Engineer Willoughby, “Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteeth-Century New Orleans” (LSU Press, 2017)

New Books In Public Health · Mar 23, 2018 · 40m

A disease cannot be fully understood unless considered in its environmental context. That conviction drives Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteeth-Century New Orleans (LSU Press, 2017) by historian Urmi Engineer Willoughby. Much more than a history of mosquitoes and scientists, the book attends to ecology, economy, and culture to explore how yellow fever arrived in the Gulf South, why yellow fever epidemics became commonplace in the Crescent City, why they finally abated, and how residents made sense of the disease. Willoughby finds answers in landscapes: the contours of sugarcane…