2026/01/20 by Suman Seth · 1 voice
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Social Sciences · #Colonialism, slavery, and trade #Migration, Health, Geopolitics, Historical Geography #Yersinia bacterium, plague, ectoparasites research
paper · doi:10.1093/pastj/gtag008
openalex publication_date 2026/01/20 · openalex created_date 2026/06/26 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/26
Abstract In December 1753, the South Carolinian physician, John Lining, wrote a letter to Dr Robert Whytt, Professor of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, offering ‘A Description of the American Yellow fever’. ‘[T]his dreadful malady, which so frequently rages like the plague in the southern parts of America’, Lining observed, seemed to strike almost everyone: ‘both sexes of the white colour, especially strangers lately arrived from cold climates, Indian, Mistees, Mulattoes of all ages, excepting young children and of those only such as had formerly escaped the infection’. Peculiarly, however, one group of people was spared. ‘There is something very singular in the constitution of the Negroes’, he claimed, ‘which renders them not liable to this fever; for though many of these were as much exposed as the nurses to the infection, yet I never knew of one instance of this fever amongst them, though they are equally subject with the white people to the bilious fever’. My aim in this article is twofold. First, I want to show how unusual a position like Lining’s was in the eighteenth century. Very, very few of those who committed their ideas to print made the claim that susceptibility or immunity to disease was a racial trait. This almost complete absence puts a point on the subsequent question: in what contexts did Lining and others develop their ideas? In answer, I divide the small handful of examples into two categories. The first may be the least surprising, for a number of authors invoked ‘Negro’ immunities to disease as a justification for African slavery in the warm climates that proved so seemingly inimical to Europeans. The second set of cases, which includes Lining, is more surprising: as we shall see, Lining’s location in South Carolina— and other writers’ connections to that state —would prove crucial.