Kathryn Olivarius, "Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom" (Harvard UP, 2022)

New Books In Public Health · Jun 10, 2023 · 1h 26m

Disease is thought to be a great leveler of humanity, but in antebellum New Orleans acquiring immunity from the scourge of yellow fever magnified the brutal inequities of slave-powered capitalism.Antebellum New Orleans sat at the heart of America’s slave and cotton kingdoms. It was also where yellow fever epidemics killed as many as 150,000 people during the nineteenth century. With little understanding of mosquito-borne viruses—and meager public health infrastructure—a person’s only protection against the scourge was to “get acclimated” by surviving the disease. About half of those who…