The Malady of Revolutions: Yellow Fever in the Atlantic World, 1793-1828

Between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, revolutions in the Americas and Europe rocked the Atlantic world and introduced new patterns of trade, warfare and migration. The patterns of long-distance trade that knitted the Atlantic World together, and the warfare and political dislocation that threatened to tear it apart also transported yellow fever far from its African origins and transformed it into an alarming health crisis that engulfed the Caribbean, new United States and southern Europe. This dissertation examines the new ecology for health management that contemporaries created to deal with the crisis. Existing scholarship on medical responses to the yellow fever pandemics focuses on imperial, local or new national contexts. Using the framework of Atlantic History, this dissertation explores how, not unlike yellow fever itself, knowledge about the disease and practices became subject to the global circulation and activities of physicians, military and naval personnel, political refugees, merchants, consuls and lay travelers who connected the diverse ports that hosted outbreaks of the disease. As a result of these actors’ complex movements and dislocations during this period, management of the health crisis became a product of exchanges that cut across the new ideological and international boundaries that began to crystallize in this period. What emerged out of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions was a rich tapestry of vibrant medical networks, literature and practices that spanned across new national divides