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The Politics of Disease Control: Yellow Fever and

Race in Nineteenth Century Rio de Janeiro

Sidney Chalhoub

Journal of Latin American Studies / Volume 25 / Issue 03 / October 1993, pp 441 - 463
DOI: 10.1017/S0022216X00006623, Published online: 05 February 2009

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0022216X00006623

How to cite this article:

Sidney Chalhoub (1993). The Politics of Disease Control: Yellow Fever and Race in
Nineteenth Century Rio de Janeiro. Journal of Latin American Studies, 25, pp
441-463 doi:10.1017/S0022216X00006623

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 The Politics of Disease Control:
Yellow Fever and Race in Nineteenth
Century Rio de Janeiro

SIDNEY CHALHOUB*

During the first half of the nineteenth century, as cholera and yellow fever
epidemics ravaged the Old and the New World alike, Brazil seemed to
enjoy the reputation of being a remarkably salubrious country. In spite of
its geographical position, its climate and the abundance of those elements
that prevailing medical wisdom considered conducive to the more
aggravated forms of disease, the fact was that Brazil long remained free of
the two most visible scourges of the times.1
Of course, the absence of yellow fever and cholera did not mean that
the sanitary conditions of the land then - or now, for that matter - were
particularly good, but it remained true that these conditions could be so
described, or even sincerely perceived, as such by both Brazilian and
foreign observers. An English physician, Dr J. O. M'William, for
example, in his account of the yellow fever epidemic of the summer of
1849-50, remarked that 'until lately' - and with the exception of smallpox
which had been introduced by the slave trade - Brazil' has been generally
considered as wholly exempt... from sweeping epidemic disease of any
kind'. He went on to cite another physician who pondered conditions in
Rio and asked: ' Why is it that, in a land-locked harbour in this part of the
world, under a powerful sun, surrounded by marshes and rich vegetation,
ships lie for months or years without a single case of concentrated fever;
while in Asia, in Africa, in North America, and more especially in the

* This paper was written while I was a Fulbright/LASPAU visiting scholar at the
Freedmen and Southern Society Project and the department of history at the University
of Maryland, College Park, in the fall and winter of 1991-2. My thanks to Ira Berlin,
Michael Hall and Robert Slenes for their critical comments and corrections of my
English.
1
See Donald B. Cooper, 'Brazil's Long Fight against Epidemic Disease, 1849-1917,
with Special Emphasis on Yellow Fever', Bulletin of New York Academy of Medicine, vol.
51, no. ; (1975), PP- 672-3.

Sidney Chalhoub is Assistant Professor of History, Universidade Estadual de Campinas

(UNICAMP), Brazil.

J. Lai. Amer. Stud. 25, 441-463 Copyright © 1993 Cambridge University Press 441

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 44 2 Sidney Chalhoub

West Indian Islands, things, which to superficial observers appear the

same, are productive of so much disease and death?' 2
Within a few years, the whole situation had changed. The widely held
belief that the equator was an effective barrier against the southward
progress of yellow fever disappeared, and more than a third of Rio's
266,000 inhabitants were estimated to have contracted the disease in the
summer of 1849-50. The official death toll in this first outbreak amounted
to 4,160 people, and this was very probably an underestimate.3 Yellow
fever reappeared unfailingly in the following summers, sending well-to-
do members of the community scrambling for carriages and boats to leave
the city. In 1855 and 1856, moreover, a devastating cholera epidemic
finally reached Rio de Janeiro and several other places in Brazil.4 In the
decades to come, with yellow fever causing major embarrassments to
commercial activities and, later, to immigration policies, Brazilian
politicians and public authorities addressed the problems created by the
disease in the capital; in doing so, they had to address major political and
ideological themes which became inescapably entangled with the challenge
of yellow fever.
The medical explanations for the appearance and growth of Rio's
yellow fever epidemics in two different moments - in the early 18 5 os,
2
J. O. M'William, 'Some Account of the Yellow Fever Epidemy by which Brazil was
Invaded in the Latter Part of the Year 1849', Medical Times, London, vol. II (1851),
p. 450.
3
Both the estimate of the number of people who contracted the disease and the death
toll come from Jose Pereira Rego, Histdria e descricao dafebre amarella epidemica quegrassou
no Rio de Janeiro em ISJO (Rio de Janeiro, 1851). The number of victims was compiled
by Rego from hospital records and other sources after the epidemic, and was later
adopted by the imperial government as the official figure. During the outbreak,
however, the imperial government forbade newspapers to publish the daily number of
victims, and did its best to conceal the real extent of the epidemic. The practice of
concealing the number of victims was common in similar circumstances in Europe and
the USA as well, and it obviously led to much confusion and wild speculation as to the
real number of victims; see Roberto Lallemant, Observacoes acerca da epidemia de febre
amarella do ano de ISJO no Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro, 1851), pp. 12-13. Lallemant
himself estimated that 100,000 people had contracted the disease, and 10,000 had died.
Another author, W. M'Kinlay, holds that' the statement most generally credited says,
that 15,000 died between the 1st. December 1849 and 1st. September 1850'; see
M'Kinlay,' Remarks on the Yellow Fever which Appeared of Late Years on the Coast
of Brazil', The Monthly Journal of Medical Science, London and Edinburgh, vol. XV
(1852), p. 340. Croker Pennell thought that 13,000 deaths was a 'most moderate'
estimate; see his A Short Report upon Yellow Fever as it Appeared in Brazil During the
Summer of 1849-18JO (Rio de Janeiro, I8JO), p. 9. The Lancet, London, vol. I (1852), p.
182, holds that 'upwards of 12,000 persons had died in hospitals and private houses in
Rio'. The fact remains, however, that Pereira Rego was the only one who bothered to
indicate from where he was drawing his numbers.
4
See Donald Cooper, 'The New "Black Death": Cholera in Brazil, 1855-1856', in
Kenneth Kiple (ed.), The African Exchange: Toward a Biological History of Black People
(Durham and London, 1987), pp. 235-56.

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 The Politics of Yellow Fever in Brazil 443

when the disease first appeared, and in the early 1870s, when it returned
after a relatively long lapse in the 1860s - demonstrate the continuous
interplay between medical thinking and political and racial ideology.
Furthermore, I suggest that the crisis in labour relations in Brazil in the
last decades of the nineteenth century reshaped public and medical
perceptions of the disease. In other words, in coping with yellow fever at
a particular historical moment, the public health officials of the City of Rio
laid some of the main foundations of the so-called Brazilian whitening
ideal - that is, the configuration of a racial ideology which expected to
eliminate the African heritage from Brazilian society through immigration
and miscegenation, as well as some more pernicious forms of inaction and
wishful thinking.

Yellow fever and medical theory in the I8JOS

As was the case everywhere that yellow fever struck in the nineteenth
century, Brazilian physicians and public officials failed to understand the
causes of the epidemic and to devise efficient ways of dealing with it.5 As
elsewhere, the overall theoretical question was to discover whether yellow
fever was propagated through contagion or infection. The contagionists
held that the disease could be transmitted from person to person, either
directly, through physical contact, or indirectly, by touching objects
belonging to the diseased or by breathing the air in their immediate
vicinity. In other words, contagionists believed that yellow fever occurred
because of a particular poison which, once produced, could be propagated
from one individual to another irrespective of the continuation of the
original causes. The anticontagionists, or infectionists, on the other hand,
believed that yellow fever had its origin in local causes - that is, that the
disease was a product of miasmata, the noxious emanations coming from
animal and vegetal matter in putrefaction. Therefore, infectionists held
that yellow fever could not be transmitted from one individual to another
through physical contact, since its production occurred in the atmosphere
and was due to 'general miasmatic causes'.6
5
For detailed accounts of yellow fever epidemics in the US South and how public
authorities and doctors tried to come to grips with them, see Jo Ann Carrigan, 'The
Saffron Scourge: a History of Yellow Fever in Louisiana, 1796-190;', unpubl. PhD
diss., The Louisiana State University, 1961; John Duffy, Sword of Pestilence: the New
Orleans Yellow Fever Epidemic of ISJJ (Baton Rouge, 1966); Margareth Ellen Warner,
' Public Health in the New South: Government, Medicine and Society in the Control
of Yellow Fever', unpubl. PhD. diss., Harvard University, 1983. For a study of the
evolution of the epidemiological debate about yellow fever in Europe in the nineteenth
century, see William Coleman, Ye/low Fever in the North: the Methods of Early
Epidemiology (Madison, 1987).
6
Almost all medical treatises in the nineteenth century had to recite these most general
definitions of contagion and infection. I draw my definitions here from the entries for

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 444 Sidney Chalhoub

Physicians — Brazilians and others — argued their cases on this subject

endlessly, and many in fact spent their lives doing so; thus, I will spare
myself and the readers from a detailed account of the arguments presented
by the medical authorities involved in this debate, even though the
reasoning and evidence provided by the two rival sects are not without
interest. Indeed, there were solid grounds in science and experience to
support each of the contending parties, and there were no scientific or
experimental grounds at that time which could not be totally confused by
the random logic of mosquitos' biting preferences. In any case, it is
important to note that those who believed in the contagion of yellow fever
were in favour of such measures as quarantines for arriving ships and
strict isolation of the diseased - for example, in hospitals established
outside city limits. Infectionists, on the other hand, deemed such actions
ineffective, and defended more sweeping measures intended to transform
local conditions and check the production of miasmatic emanations. The
latter, in fact, provided the basic ideological rationale for the urban reforms
carried out in several western cities in the second half of the nineteenth
century and the first decades of the twentieth.
It was against this background that Brazilian doctors and public health
officials had to deal with the challenge of yellow fever. Even though there
were theoretical discussions aplenty, with contagionists and infectionists
hurling their convictions at one another, it is possible to discern some
major trends among the physicians who were commissioned by the
Imperial government to lead the fight against the disease — thus
establishing a commission which would be the source for the creation,
months later, of the Junta Central de Higiene Publica, the first Brazilian
General Board of Health.7

these words in a dictionary of medical terms which was quite popular in Imperial
Brazil: Pedro Luiz Napoleao Chernoviz, Diccionario de medicina popular (Paris, 1890,
sixth edition). There are some interesting discussions of the historical significance of
the concept of infection: Erwin H. Ackerknecht,' Anticontagionism Between 1821 and
1867', bulletin ofthe History of Medicine, vol. 22 (1948), pp. 562-93; Roger Cooter,
'Anticontagionism and History's Medical Record', in Peter Wright and Andrew
Treacher (eds.), The Problem of Medical Knowledge: Examining the Social Construction of
Medicine (Edinburgh, 1982); Owsei Temkin, 'An Historical Analysis of the Concept of
Infection', The Double Face of Janus and Other Essays in the History of Medicine (Baltimore
and London, 1977).
7
The Junta was created by decree on 14 Sept. 1850, and the law which regulated its
functioning was enacted on 29 Sept. 1851. It was composed of five members-all
medical doctors - and had no executive power; it was devised as a board advisory to
the Imperial government and to provincial governments as well. Unless otherwise
noted, the following paragraphs, and in fact much of what follows in this paper, are
based upon the surviving papers of the Junta. The major collections are: in the Arquivo
Geral da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro, 'Higiene Publica: Atas', which is the record of the

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 The Politics of Yellow Fever in Brazil 445

The health officials in charge were rather eclectic in their theoretical

interpretation of the causes of the 'reigning epidemic', as they often said
euphemistically when discussing yellow fever. They paid their dues to
infectionists by emphasising that the coming of the epidemic was
explained in the first place by the general neglect of the sanitary conditions
of the city. There were bad-smelling marshes and filthy stagnant waters
everywhere, the beaches reeked with household refuse, dead animals were
often left to rot on the streets and, to make matters worse, in 1850 the
season was felt to be unusually hot and humid, but without the showers
and thunderstorms which are so common in Rio during the summer. The
heat was suffocating and, according to some sharp-eyed doctors, one
could see the poisonous particles emanating from the ground and making
their way into a gray, sad atmosphere. Furthermore, the harbour was filled
with ships loaded with immigrants, many of them on their way to
California, taking the longest route to the golden lands because they
feared yellow fever in the Caribbean region.8 Pereira Rego, one of the
leading Brazilian physicians of the period, and president of the Board of
Health for almost twenty years after 1863, remarked that he could not
understand how these European immigrants stood so much filth and
degradation. Moreover, there was the constant arrival of Africans because
of the slave trade which, since it had become officially illegal and therefore
unchecked, was carried on in the most harmful and unhealthy
circumstances. To sum up, doctors, in reconstructing events through
hindsight, were able to find a wealth of material decomposing in the city
under the scorching heat of that summer and, as Pereira Rego put it, ready
to unleash 'a terrible outcome for humanity'.9
Pereira Rego and his colleagues, however, also argued that all these
preexisting conditions in the capital would not in themselves have
produced the epidemic unless a specific poison or focus of infection had
also been imported into the city; in doing so, the doctors showed that they
believed yellow fever could be transmitted by some sort of contagion. In

proceedings of the meetings of the Junta, and 'Higiene Piiblica: Avisos do Governo',
which contains basically government acts concerning sanitation and questions of public
health in general; in the Arquivo National do Rio de Janeiro,' Ministerio do Imperio/Junta
Central de Higiene Piiblica: Offcios e documentos diversos', which contains the
correspondence, reports and other papers sent by the Junta to the Ministerio do
Imperio, the branch of the Imperial government in charge of public health. These
collections, except for minor flaws, cover extensively the last decades of the Brazilian
Empire (1850-89). They are also particularly strong in documenting the situation in the
city of Rio, even though the materials are by no means restricted to that city.
Donald B. Cooper, 'Brazil's Long Fight Against Epidemic Disease', p. 676.
Jose Pereira Rego, Histo'ria e descrifao da febre amarella epidemica que grassou no Rio de
Janeiro em ISJO, p. 1.

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 446 Sidney Chalhoub

trying to trace the chain of the transmission of the disease, they were able
to link the outbreak of the epidemic in Bahia, Rio and elsewhere in the
country to the arrival of particular ships with cases of yellow fever in the
harbours of various cities. They found the evidence for the importation
of the disease so overwhelming that it tended to eclipse much of what they
had been saying concerning the prevailing local conditions for the
spontaneous generation of the epidemic. In practical terms, this outlook
led to emphasis on the isolation of patients in hospitals outside the
downtown area and to the enforcement of quarantine measures in the
following outbreaks, even though one senses from reading the Junta's
reports that there were enormous difficulties in applying just these
measures with any degree of efficiency. Especially regarding quarantine
regulations, public health officials immediately had to face mounting
pressure from the British, whose free-trade influenced scientific tenets
made them radical defenders of the infection theory, i.e. the idea of the
local generation of the disease. English diplomats told the Imperial
government in straightforward language that quarantines were 'harmful
to commerce and harmless to yellow jack'.10

The politics of yellow fever in the I8JOS

Perhaps no one gave much credit to the science of the British in any case,
since it is possible to find other strong reasons for the timidity of the
Imperial government in dealing with yellow fever outbreaks in the 18 5 os.
First, there was the lack of understanding by the medical science of the
period concerning the transmission of yellow fever. While infectionists
and contagionists kept screaming at each other - the Board of Health
itself remained sharply divided in the early 18 5 os - it was difficult even for
people of moderate and conciliatory views like Pereira Rego to convince
the government to approve funds for carrying out the Board's
prescriptions.11 Even worse, how were particular medical theories to be
transformed into practical measures? Doctors were clearly at a loss.
Pereira Rego, for example, studied every outbreak in the 1850s in much
detail, and soon had second thoughts about the efficiency of quarantine
regulations. Even though he never abandoned the conviction that the
10
See 'Higiene Piiblica. Avisos do Governo (1850-4)', Codice 8.3.7, f°ls- 199—207,
Arquivo Geral da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro.
11
For evidence regarding serious tension within the Junta itself, see 184-22, Ministerio
do Imperio/Junta Central de Higiene Publica, 1851-3. Paula Candido, the first
president of the Junta, was also a member of the Brazilian Parliament, and there he was
forced to debate his moderately anticontagionist views with his peers; see Annaes do
Parliament!) Brasikiro, Camara dos Deputados, 1850, vol. 2. Of course, doctors staged
memorable brawls in the sections of the Academia Imperial de Medicina; see, for
example, a debate in which Paula Candido was involved in Annaes Brasilienses de
Medicina, August 1859.

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 The Politics of Yellow Fever in Brazil 447

epidemic of the summer of 1849-50 was due to importation, he suspected

that the succeeding outbreaks originated in the inner city. In this case, the
disease might have become endemic in the capital and quarantines could
have but limited results in preventing an epidemic.12
Infectionists, on the other hand, had little to offer in order to thwart the
local causes which could be responsible for the generation of yellow fever.
Since they did not know what these causes really were, they may have
accidentally been close, though far from close enough, in complaining
about marshes and stagnant water, but they otherwise now appear
ludicrous in prescribing the watering of streets in order to prevent
poisonous particles from reaching the atmosphere, or in looking to the
skies in hopes that thunderstorms would restore nature's equilibrium or
kill the unknown enemy altogether. These were enlightened opinions.
Others thought that church bells should not toll announcing deaths
during an epidemic because people would be depressed and more
susceptible to disease. Indeed, it was too early, at least in Bra2il, to find
city administrators and investors capable of translating medical theory -
and especially the doctrine of infection — into clear-headed and costly
plans for urban renewal. With so much uncertainty in the medical field, it
was hard to get the government to do a great deal about yellow fever.
Nevertheless, the situation in the medical field is by no means a
sufficient explanation for the limited response of the Imperial government
to yellow fever in the 18 5 os. By observing once again patterns which had
occurred elsewhere, Brazilian doctors immediately noticed that yellow
fever was somehow less damaging to the African and Afro-Brazilian
population. To be sure, Africans and their descendants were much
affected in the first outbreak, that beginning in December 1849, but it was
found that they usually suffered a mild form of the disease. Local whites
and especially immigrants paid a much heavier toll in the loss of lives. This
biological feature of yellow fever never failed to produce important
political and ideological consequences whenever the disease struck
societies still deeply committed to the institution of slavery, and Brazil in
the mid-nineteenth century was no exception.13
12
Annaes Brasilienses de Medicina, no. 11, Jan. 18;8, pp. 310-19.
13
Nineteenth-century observers were unanimous regarding both the greater susceptibility
of European immigrants and the stronger resistance of black people to yellow fever;
the works cited by Lallemant, Pereira Rego, Croker Pennell etc. can be consulted as
examples. As for present-day medical science, it is a well-established fact in genetic
research that Africans and their descendants evolved blood characteristics -
haemoglobin defences - that resist malaria parasites and forestall their multiplication;
yellow fever, however, has failed to stimulate genetic research of the same kind. Kiple
and King argue convincingly that 'the black did possess innate yellow fever
immunities, immunities that medical science has yet to acknowledge let alone explain,
but immunities that nonetheless are discernible within the history of black, white, and

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 448 Sidney Chalhoub

It has been suggested that the epidemic in the summer of 1849-50 may
have played a role in convincing the Brazilian Parliament finally to yield
to British pressure and bring the slave trade to an end.14 There are several
ways in which this subject may be approached. For example, Bernardo
Pereira de Vasconcelos, an influential Brazilian politician who strongly
resisted British pressure against the Imperial government on the slave
trade question, died of yellow fever in May 1850. One British official
celebrated the event with the following comment: ' his death will remove
one of the chiefest obstacles [sic] to the suppression of the slave trade in
this country'.15 Moving on to less obvious causal links, one may recall
that in the late 1840s politicians and city officials in Rio often had to deal
with scares of slave revolts in nearby counties — in Campos, Valenca,
Vassouras and elsewhere — and they could not imagine what would
happen if the rebellious spirit of bondsmen in nearby plantation areas
eventually infected the more than one hundred thousand slaves then
living in the capital.16 Thus, the most threatening exercise was to regard
yellow fever as a possible ally of rebellious slaves: General Yellow Jack
had ravaged the French and the British armies in the age of the Haitian

red men and the yellow plague'; seen Kenneth Kiple and Virginia King, Another
Dimension to the Black Diaspora: Diet, Disease, and Racism (Cambridge, 1981), ch. 2 (the
citation is from pp. 50-1). The evidence from Rio - Africans were much affected in the
1850 outbreak, but usually suffered a mild form of the disease - seems to support Kiple
and King's argument for Africans' innate yellow fever immunities. Of course, many
Africans living in Rio at the time must have acquired immunity to yellow fever by
having had the disease as children in their native continent - where yellow fever was
often endemic. On the other hand, the intensification of Portuguese immigration to Rio
starting in the late 1840s may have played an important role in the coming and the
taking roots of the disease in the city - the number of yellow fever susceptibles
increased enormously in those years. Besides the work cited by Kiple and King, a useful
account of the mode of transmission of yellow fever can be found in Coleman, Yellow
Fever in the North, ch. 1. As for Portuguese immigration to Rio, see Luiz Felipe de
Alencastro, ' Proletaires et esclaves: immigres portugais et captifs africains a Rio de
Janeiro- 1850-1872', Cahiers du CR.IAR, Publications de l'Universite de Rouen, no.
4 (i984)-
14
According to Luiz Felipe de Alencastro, 'Les vecteurs supposes de cette maladie
desormais endemique au Bresil, etaient les Africains nouvellement arrives au pays.
Cette menace virale s'ajoute a la menace sociale deja sous-jacente pour renforcer
dramatiquement la mefiance de la population libre vis-a-vis des Africains'. Also, it was
said in the Senate - in January 1850-that Pemambuco had thus far escaped the
epidemic because the illegal slave trade had ceased in that province. Luiz Felipe de
Alencastro, 'Le commerce des vivants: traite d'esclaves et "pax lusitana" dans
l'Atlantique Sud', these de doctorat, Universite de Paris X, 1985, pp. 517 and 554.
15
As cited in Leslie Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade: Britain, Brazil and
the Slave Trade Question (Cambridge, 1970), p. 334.
16
Sidney Chalhoub, Visoes da liberdade: uma historia das ultimas decadas da escravidao na Corte
(Sao Paulo, 1990), pp. 186-98.

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 The Politics of Yellow Fever in Brazil 449

revolution, and there had been examples of yellow fever epidemics in the
US South which were accompanied by rumours of slave revolts.17
The epidemic of 1850 may have further contributed to the end of the
Brazilian slave trade because there was an ongoing discussion in the
medical journals of the time about the possibility of yellow fever being
somewhat connected with the infamous commerce. In fact, the ship which
was blamed for the importation of the disease to Bahia — an American
vessel coming from New Orleans with a possible stop in Havana — was
charged with having been involved in the slave trade.18 Mr Hudson, the
same British official who wittily celebrated Vasconcelos's death, observed
that the fact that the epidemic was eventually traced back to a slave ship
proved to be a powerful weapon in the hands of opponents of the trade.19
It was a French doctor, however, Monsieur Audouard, who developed
more thoroughly the hypothesis of the connection between yellow fever
and the slave trade. In a series of articles published from the 1820s to the
early 1850s, Dr Audouard held that the slave trade was the cause of black
vomit. In the 1820s, the author observed that yellow fever outbreaks in
North America became less frequent after the abolition of the slave trade
in 1808. According to him, there were eight yellow fever epidemics in the
USA from 1808 to 1820, while there had been fifty-three such outbreaks
in the twelve years prior to 1808. Likewise, in the late 1830s Dr Audouard
was heartened by reports that yellow fever no longer ravaged the French
colonies, while it continued to strike Spanish possessions. In his opinion,
the explanation was to be found in the fact that the Spanish were still
engaged in the slave trade. Dr Audouard's argument was that the germ of
yellow fever was generated in slave ships. The conditions in which
Africans were transported, crowded in filthy holds with insufficient food
17
'The yellow fever had the French Army in its grip. Toussaint and Dessalines had
known that this was coming, had calculated on it', in C. L. R. James, The Black
jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York, 1989, 2nd ed.),
p. 333; Geggus, David, 'Yellow Fever in the 1790's: the British Army in Occupied
Saint Domingue', Medical History, vol. 23, no. 1 (1979), pp. 38-58. About yellow fever
and slave revolt in the US South, see Jo Ann Carrigan, 'Yellow Fever: Scourge of the
South', in Todd Savitt and James H. Young, Disease and Distinctiveness in the American
South (Knoxville, 1988), p. 62.
18
The subject was controversial. Pereira Rego believed in the importation by the
American vessel; Histdria e descrifao, p. 34; so did A. Paterson, 'Observations on the
Origin and Nature of the Bulam or Yellow Fever, as it Appeared in Bahia (Brazil), in
the end of 1849 and the beginning of 1850', The London Medical Gazette, vol. XLVII
(1851), pp. 541-7; also, J. O. M'William, 'Some Account of the Yellow Fever'.
Lallemant held the opposing view; see Observacoes, p. 44; and so did T. Baker, 'The
Yellow Fever Epidemy in the Brazils', Medical Times, London, vol. II (1851), pp.
489-91, 545; also, W. M'Kinlay, 'Remarks on the Yellow Fever which Appeared of
Late Years on the Coast of Brazil', Monthly Journal of Medical Science, London and
Edinburgh, vol. XV (1852), pp. 254-74; 335-52; 424-41.
19
Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade, p. 334.

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 450 Sidney Chalhoub

and without even the chance of going above deck to fulfil their physical
necessities, were deemed responsible for the coming to existence of the
germ of yellow fever. The human waste produced under these
circumstances ingrained itself into the rotten timbers in the hulls of slave
ships and, under the scorching heat of the tropical sun, touched off some
unknown chemical process which originated the poison. Almost as an
afterthought, the French scientist added that the whole situation was even
riskier because the human waste in question was produced by, as he put
it, 'the Negro race'.20
Even though Audouard's ideas caused some controversy in medical
journals, it does not seem that many physicians believed in such an
extreme connection between yellow fever and the slave trade. In his
writings, Pereira Rego cited Audouard and showed that he was aware of
his work, but was openly sceptical about the possibility of the poison
being generated in ships, put to whatever use.21 What Pereira Rego, as
well as many other doctors, did seem to believe was that the slave trade
might be important in transplanting the germ of yellow fever from one
place to another. Indeed, the fact that Africans and their descendants
suffered the disease in a milder form, and given that most slaves in the
capital at this point had been born in Africa, meant that there was always
the suspicion that Africans suffered less from the disease because they had
become acclimatised to it in their native lands. In other words, Africans
might be efficient in carrying the germ in their bodies and in transmitting
it further — all this, of course, if one chose to believe in contagion — but
20
M.-F.-M. Audouard, 'Memoire sur l'origine et les causes de la fievre jaune, consideree
comme etant principalement le resultat de l'infection des batiments negriers, d'apres les
observations faites a Barcelone en 1821, et au Port-du-Passage, en 1823', Revue Me'dkale
Frartfaise et Etrangere, Paris, vol. Ill (1824), pp. 360-408;'La traite des noirs consideree
comme la cause de la fievre jaune', Journal des Connaissances Me'dko-Chirurgicales, Paris,
vol. VI (1838-9); Fievre jaune et traite des noirs (Paris, 1849); 'Sur la fievre jaune qui
regne en ce moment au Bresil, et sur l'origine de cette maladie', Revue Me'dkale Francaise
et Etrangere, Paris, vol. II (1850), 65-8; 'Reponseau memoire de M. le docteur Durand-
Fardel, sous le titre: Des maladies contagieuses et infectieuses, a propos d'un autre
memoire sur la fievre jaune et la traite des noirs', Ibid., vol. I (18; 1), pp. 399-408;
' L'etiologie de la fievre jaune dans ses rapports avec la navigation en general et la traite
des noirs en particulier', Ibid., vol. II (1853), pp. 656-72.
21
Rego, Histo'ria e descricao, pp. 52, 86. Audouard was explicitly rebuked by doctors in
Cuba; the debate is summarised, with the author openly favouring Audouard's critics,
in L. Blacquiere,' La traite des noirs consideree comme cause de la fievre jaune', Journal
des Connaissances Me'dko-Chirurgicales, Paris, vol. VI (1838-9), pp. 102-4. See also
M. Durand-Fardel, 'Des maladies contagieuses et infectieuses, a propos d'un memoire
de M. Audouard, intitule: Fievre jaune et traite des noirs', Revue Me'dkale Franfaise et
Etrangere, Paris, vol. II (1850), pp. 643-57. As late as 1875, an American doctor took
the trouble to argue that there was no relationship between yellow fever and the slave
trade. Audouard is not cited in the article, however; see J. Jones, 'Researches on the
Relations of the African Slave-Trade in the West Indies and Tropical America to
Yellow Fever', Virginia Medical Monthly, Richmond, vol. II (1875), pp. n-26.

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 The Politics of Yellow Fever in Brazil 451

the most clear-headed doctors were not confident enough to rule out any
possibility at this point.
To sum up, it is possible that in the early 1850s the imperial
government thought that the cessation of the African trade had in fact
been the most promising measure it could take in order to deal with
yellow fever. Little else was needed, and the customary theatrical acts had
also been performed: a Board of Health had been created, composed of a
handful of notables and with almost no power to put its ideas into effect;
the Emperor himself would show his concern during the worst outbreaks
by visiting hospitals and making generous donations from his personal
assets in order to boost the efforts of charitable organisations engaged in
diminishing the plight of immigrants - especially Portuguese immigrants
- who died by the scores in each new visitation of the disease.22 Perhaps
this is unfair to the enduring reputation of the Brazilian monarchy, but
what one really glimpses here is the entrails of a society still deeply
committed to the institution of slavery: with the flood of enslaved
Africans which had occurred in the 1840s there was no need to worry
about obtaining any new source of cheap labour for the plantations in the
near future. Since yellow fever did not seem significantly to affect Africans
- or the acclimatised propertied classes - there was no real feeling of great
urgency concerning the disease in the 1850s. Roberto Lallemant, for
example, was somewhat disturbed by the way in which the Health
Commission in charge of leading the fight against the disease in its first
outbreak tried to quiet the anxieties of the population. In an article
published in a city paper, the physicians explained that Africans and native
Brazilians had little to fear from the epidemic, but then they proceeded to
caption their remarks with the exhortation: 'Haveis de morrer, vos,
estrangeiros!' ('You shall die, you, foreigners!'). Lallemant, who was
German, thought that the Commission had been 'a bit too patriotic'.23
Yellow fever in the 1870s would be a quite different story.

Race, environment and acclimation

Before moving on to give an account of yellow fever in the 1870s, it may
be useful to see what Brazilian doctors did — and did not do — in order to
explain the fact that Africans and Afro-Brazilians suffered comparatively
less from the disease than local whites and, especially, European
22
J. F. Bareiros, 'Relatorio sobre a epidemia que grassou nos navios de guerra
estacionados no porto do Rio de Janeiro em 1849 a 1850', Jornal da Sociedade das
Sciencias Me'dicas de Lisboa, Segunda Serie, vol. VII (1850), pp. 168-73, 336—47; 'A
Febre Amarella no Rio de Janeiro em 1873 ; Relatorio da Comissao Central Portuguesa
de Socorros', Ga^eta Me'dica de Lisboa, vol. XXII (1874), pp. 209-12, 238-41, 267-70,
293-8, 321-4, 376-81.
23
R o b e r t o Lallemant, Observafdes acerca da epidemia de febre amarella, p . 10.

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 452 Sidney Chalhoub

immigrants. They certainly did not tread the path of doctors in the US
South who, confronted with both devastating yellow fever epidemics and
the need to justify slavery in the 1850s, eventually jumped to the
conclusion that African Americans were beings of a different species,
somewhat less than human, and expressly designed by nature to endure
disease and labour under the burning tropical sun. One of the most
conspicuous defenders of this idea, Dr Samuel Cartwright of New
Orleans, gave little credit to his peers' endless discussions about the
concepts of infection and contagion. Instead, he blamed yellow fever
epidemics on the willingness of 'wealthy capitalists' and poor European
immigrants to contradict nature: 'All those sanitary measures, therefore,
which may be instituted to protect New Orleans against pestilence, would
be incomplete and ineffectual unless the practice of making negroes out of
the master race of men, and turning them out to labor in the hot
summer's sun, be abolished.>24
At least some Brazilian medical men were also suspicious of the kind of
climatic determinism which was all too common among European
doctors at the time, and which usually led, through muddled reasoning,
to conclusions about the shortcomings of life in the tropics and tropical
peoples as well. A good example is provided by Dr Robert Dundas, a
British physician who worked in Bahia and published, in 1852, a long
treatise on the theme of 'tropical and European fever'.25 Dr Dundas's
main purpose was to explain the alleged decay of Europeans in hot
climates. His argument started with the observation that in hot climates
' the secretion from the external capillary system is incessant and profuse,
while the secretion from the kidneys is in an equal ratio diminished'. What
followed from this was that long exposure to tropical heat impaired the
capillary system which was 'weakened by long continued over-
excitement' due to 'profuse perspiration'.26 He thought that Europeans
could not tolerate more than five years in the topics without permanent
damage to their health, since after this period it would be impossible to
bring the kidneys back to normal activity and restore the over-worked
capillary system. He discarded the idea of 'acclimatisation' as fallacious,
and quickly moved on to more troubling conclusions: the Brazilian,' who
descended from European ancestors', but had 'a considerable admixture

24
Samuel Cartwright, ' P r e v e n t i o n o f Y e l l o w F e v e r ' , New Orleans Medical and Surgical
Journal, no. 10 (November 1853), P- 3°^; s e e also his 'Report on the Diseases and
Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race', Ibid., no. 7 (May 1851), pp. 692-713. For a
detailed account of the context of Cartwright's and related ideas, see Kiple and King,
Another Dimension to the Black Diaspora, a n d T o d d L . Savitt, Medicine and Slavery: the
Diseases and Health Care oj Blacks in Antebellum Virginia (Urbana, 1978).
25
R o b e r t D u n d a s , Sketches of Brazil; Including New Views on Tropical and European Fever,
with Remarks on a Premature Decay of the System Incident to Europeans on their Return from
26
Hot Climates (London, 1852). Dundas, Sketches of Brazil, p. 51.

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 The Politics of Yellow Fever in Brazil 45 3

of African and native American blood... is indolent by nature, and

indisposed for active exertion or industry'.27 Furthermore, the context
provided an easy rationale for understanding different African and
European susceptibilities to fevers:
The comparative exemption from fever enjoyed by the Negro race in hot climates
is another well-established fact; and its solution, I apprehend, will be found
chiefly in the peculiar structure of the dermoid membrane of the black, in the
abundant and often highly-offensive sebaceous or oleaginous secretion, with
which the surface of the African is naturally anointed, and which preserves him
against the effects of sudden atmospheric changes.
And finally, we find nature's explanation for the relative positions of
Africans and Europeans in labour relations:
Also, the more energetic performance of the functions of the cutaneous system
in the negro, as compared with the European, renders him less subject to
exhaustion in the hot and humid atmosphere of his native climate.28
Such arguments, then current among doctors in the US South and
Europe, do not appear — so far as I know — in the Brazilian medical
literature of the 1850s. In confronting the question of the relative
immunity of Africans and African Brazilians to yellow fever, physicians in
Rio usually argued along the following lines: first, they would recognise
the reality of such relative immunity, but only in a cursory manner, never
singling out the subject for detailed consideration; second, they would
subsume this aspect in the most general and abstract notions of
environment and acclimatisation. Yellow fever was made possible, if not
generated, by poor sanitary conditions featuring filthy marshes and all
kinds of animal and vegetable material in decomposition; people who had
long been exposed to such conditions - for example, native Brazilians
from the city of Rio — tended to fare better during an epidemic than those
who were still becoming acquainted with such an environment — as
immigrants recently arrived from Europe. If anything else was added, it
was just to grant that medical knowledge about epidemic diseases was still
too imperfect and could not yet provide answers to all relevant questions
on the subject.
If this may seem rather evasive, one can have a look at the course
description provided by Professor Doctor Thomaz Gomes dos Santos,
who taught 'Public Hygiene and the History of Medicine' for several
years in the 1850s at the Faculdade de Medicina do Rio de Janeiro - one
of the two medical schools in the country in the nineteenth century. Dr
Santos focused on questions which were especially significant to 'the
present and the future of the country', and sought out 'to destroy', as he
27
D u n d a s , Sketches of Brazil, p p . 104, 209.
28
D u n d a s , Sketches of Brazil, p. 324.

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 454 Sidney Chalhoub

put it, errors which might give rise to 'dangerous prejudice in our
society'.29
He proceeded to single out Gobineau and Montesquieu for explicit
rebuttal. Starting with Gobineau, the professor sought to analyse the
alleged importance of race in human history. According to Dr Santos, the
French thinker held ideas which contradicted ' the dignity and morality of
humankind', and could be summarised as follows: that from their origins,
human races were endowed with different qualities and, for that matter,
qualities which were not equally divided among them at all; such unequal
beginnings resulted in no human race being perfect in itself, since the
qualities of different stocks complemented each other. Furthermore,
intercourse between races was no way of achieving human perfectibility,
since the outcome of such relations was inevitably the predominance of
the features of the inferior race. Dr Santos then observed that in this
context the superiority of a given race was regarded as predetermined, and
so was the inferiority of others, and what followed was that no peoples
were to be praised for their virtues or held responsible for their vices. The
logical consequence of this doctrine would be the complete negation of
human morality, for it led to the legitimation of the dominance over the
rest of humanity by the race taken to be the most perfect. Even worse,
Gobineau's doctrine made a people's history irrelevant to its destiny, since
the only things which really mattered were the qualities originally
endowed by nature, and these were emphatically said to be unchangeable.
Noticing that Gobineau had been remarkably harsh on the 'Negro race',
Dr Santos trod the usual path of arguing that the history of Ancient Egypt
was sufficient counter-evidence to the belief that Africans were unable to
achieve highly sophisticated civilisations.
Of course, there is a great deal here of the best part of the tradition of
eighteenth-century western rationalism, much of which would be wrecked
in the wake of subsequent European imperialism and the accompanying
pseudo-science of Monsieur Gobineau and similar creatures.30 Dr Santos
proceeds to take on Montesquieu, and then we are left with a flavour of
the best part of the tradition of nineteenth-century romanticism.
29
Re/ato'rio do Ministe'rio do Impe'rio, for t h e year 1858, A n e x o D , w h i c h is entitled
'Memorias Historicas das Faculdades de Medicina e de Direito'.
30
Gobineau was later appointed Minister of France in Brazil. He lived in the capital from
March 1869 to April 1870 and enjoyed a close friendship with D. Pedro II, the Brazilian
Emperor, who seemed to listen attentively to Gobineau's long expositions. Of course,
Gobineau was extremely critical of miscegenation and its alleged results, thought that
Brazilians were comparable to monkeys etc, but it seems that his friendship with the
Emperor made him an advocate of European immigration to Brazil in the 1870s. See
Michael D . Biddiss, Father of Racist Ideology: the Social and Political Thought of Count
Gobineau (London, 1970), pp. 201-6; and George Raeders, 0 inimigo cordial do Brasil: 0
Conde de Gobineau no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1988).

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 The Politics of Yellow Fever in Brazil 45 5

Montesquieu had gone wrong in applying the doctrines of Hippocrates,

the father of Medicine, concerning the influence of climate on peoples, to
contemporary societies. According to Dr Santos, the philosopher had
made incorrect deductions from the work of the Greek physician when
arguing that hot climates had certain inevitable consequences on the
constitution of human morality. There was no reason to believe that
inter-tropical peoples were doomed to vicious customs, political servitude
and social misery. Again, this was to assign to nature what was in fact the
making of history. The best rebuttal that Dr Santos could think of in this
context was to emphasise human agency in history. Humankind was never
a simple aggregate of matter, an inevitable given produced by such and
such temperatures and other determinants of physical nature; rather,
humankind was an active principle, an assertion of moral independence
against the imprint of external factors.
The efforts of Dr Santos and other Brazilian doctors to emphasise the
interplay between environment and history in opposition to extreme
forms of racial or climatic determinism are important. In fact, Brazilian
medical men would never really discuss yellow fever in any other
framework of thought in the nineteenth century. In the 1870s, they would
firmly start out to change the environment in order to cope with the
disease; as I will show next, however, their environmental language then
acquired new and unexpected political and racial significance.

Yellow fever and the politics of medical theory in the i8yos

After being almost completely absent since 1862 - no cases at all of the
disease were registered between 1865 and 1867 ~ yellow fever reappeared
in Rio in the late 1860s, and this time was not to leave the city until the
successful eradication campaign at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Two extremely serious outbreaks, in 1873 and 1876 - causing 3,659 and
3,476 deaths respectively, plus widespread rumours that the government
was concealing the real figures - represented a turning point in the history
of yellow fever in Rio.31 To be sure, the similarities between the 1850s and
1870s are striking: medical men still talked about importation and
contagion, or miasmata and infection. However, if the framework of
thought remained the same, the emphasis shifted. While evidence was
available to make most observers believe that the disease had again been
imported to the capital in the late 1860s, and such evidence was gladly
31
For official figures concerning the number of deaths from yellow fever in Rio, year by
year, from 1850 to 1907, see Placido Barbosa and Cassio Rezende, Os services de saude
publica no Brasil, especialmente na cidade do Rio de Jatierio de 1808 a 1907 (esboco historico e
legislacao) (Rio de Janeiro, 1909), pp. 496-8. For an account of the campaign for the
eradication of yellow fever, see Nancy Stepan, Beginnings of Brazilian Science: Oswaldo
Cru\, Medical Research and Policy, 1890-1920 (New York, 1976).

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 456 Sidney Chalhoub

presented as if to show that the land had been pure and healthy until a
foreign poison violated it, the fact was that Brazilian physicians were then
ready to skip most theoretical proselytising and admit that the situation
demanded a total attack on the sources of infection - that is, the sources
for the production of miasmatic emanations — within the city. In analysing
the 1873 epidemic, for example, Pereira Rego, by then president of the
Board of Health, argued that the constant obstructions in the sewage
system, coupled with conditions in the crowded and filthy dwellings
inhabited by the poor - the so called cortifos or ' beehives' - were the two
main causes of the outbreak. Pereira Rego thought that he could
determine that the first cases of the disease had all appeared in
neighbourhoods where sewers had been clogged and housing conditions
were worse, and from these streets the epidemic had spread out to the
harbour and other areas of the city.32
The identification of the corti^os as the cooking pots for the germs of
yellow fever was of enormous symbolic and political significance. First,
there was no clear definition of what a corti^o really was, and in a city
plagued with a constant housing shortage throughout the nineteenth
century, the tendency was to consider as such any habitation which, by the
sanitarians' changeable standards, was taken to be crowded and filthy. In
reality, as soon as they concluded that yellow fever was bred in the corti^os,
public officials initiated a struggle to define the term as broadly as possible,
and they eventually found that the whole downtown area of the city of Rio
was swarming with cortifos and had to undergo a radical transformation
- for the sake of public health and, as it turned out, for the pleasure of
urban investors.33
City-planners devised ways to intervene in the urban scene in order to
avoid the production of miasmatic emanations. Whenever this objective
32
See Jose Pereira Rego, Memdria historka das epidemias defebre amarela e cbolera-morbo que
tern reinado no Brasil(Rio de Janeiro, 1875). Rego had associated sewage and corticos with
yellow fever a year earlier in his Esbofo histdrko das epidemias que tern grassado na cidade do
Rio de Janeiro desde 1S30 a iSyo (Rio de Janeiro, 1872). See also the discussions in the
Academia Imperial de Medicina do Rio de Janeiro, which are transcribed in Annaes
Brasilienses de Medicina, Tomo XXV (1873), nos. 1 (pp. 4-31), 2 (pp. 43-57), 3
(pp. 92-4), 5 (pp. 168-75), 6 and 7 (pp. 202-;).
33
Of course, public officials were also very much afraid of what they construed as the
'dangerous classes'; see Sidney Chalhoub, Trabalho, lar e botequim: 0 cotidiano dos
trabalhadores no Rio de Janeiro da Belle Epoque (Sao Paulo, 1986), pp. 35-58. I described
the whole process in some detail in 'A guerra contra os cortijos: cidade do Rio,
1850-1906', Primeira Versao, no. 19 (1990), Campinas, UNICAMP, pp. 1-48; and then
summarised it again in 'Dangerous Classes', Trabalhadores, no. 6 (1990), pp. 2-22. A
good history of corticos in Rio is Lilian Fessler Vaz, ' Contribuiijao ao estudo da
produgao e transformagao do espago da habitagao popular: as habitagoes coletivas no
Rio Antigo', M.A. thesis, Rio de Janeiro, PUR/UFRJ, 1985. See also Oswaldo Porto
Rocha, A era das demolicoes: cidade do Rio de Janeiro, 1870-1920 (Rio de Janeiro, 1986).

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 The Politics of Yellow Fever in Brazil 457

was unattainable, the idea was to facilitate the dispersion of the poison
with the opening of the broadest possible streets and avenues.34 As for the
corticos, the dream was to demolish them all. Starting in the 1870s, the
dwellings so denned by the sanitarians were gradually shut down for
reconstruction or demolition. The military coup d'etat in 1889 was
followed by a frenzy of such activity. Meanwhile, neither the government
nor the private sector made any serious effort to build housing facilities for
the poor.35 Part of the population which formerly inhabited the corticos
started climbing the hills and, almost imperceptibly, began inventing the
fave/as, the miserable shanty towns that remain omnipresent in the urban
landscape of Rio. In retrospect, it is hard to see what benefits the campaign
for the demolition of the corticos could have brought to public health in
the city.
There may, however, be other explanations for the importance of the
cortips to public authorities. These dwellings had traditionally been the
option for housing available to the considerable number of slaves in the
capital who had managed to obtain freedom from their masters. It was in
these tiny and crowded rooms that freedmen could reunite their families,
or join their friends, once bondage was over. In fact, even slaves were
often to be found living in corticos, since it was relatively common for
masters in Rio to allow their captives to live by themselves; furthermore,
these dwellings were natural hiding places for runaway slaves.36 With the
deepening housing crisis in the city in the 1870s and 1880s because of
internal migration and the arrival of immigrants - most of them
Portuguese willing to work in the city's commercial sector — the corticos
became even more densely populated and democratically, though not
always peacefully, shared by immigrants and Afro-Brazilians. Thus public
health officials imagined and effectively saw some striking scenes: in
describing the corticos, they seemed to be reconstructing the ships —
including slave ships - which had been and sometimes still were held
responsible for the nurture of the germs of yellow fever. They perceived
these slums as overpopulated places with dirty stagnant waters and all
sorts of damaging effluvia. Furthermore, when black vomit manifested
itself every summer, immigrants seemed to die by the score in these places
while Afro-Brazilians generally survived yellow fever (actually, they were
34
For one of the earliest statements of this rationale for Rio, see Candido Barata Ribeiro,
Quaes as medidas sanitarias que devem ser aconselhadas para impedir 0 desenvolvimento e
propagafio dafebre amarela na cidade do Rio de Janeiro? Thesis, Faculdade de Medicina do
Rio de Janeiro, 1877. With the establishment of the Republican regime, Barata Ribeiro
was appointed the first mayor of Rio in the early 1890s.
35
T h e little they did is described in Lia d e A q u i n o Carvalho, Habitafdes populares: Rio de
Janeiro, 1886-1906 (Rio de Janeiro, 1986).
36
Sidney Chalhoub, Visoes da liberdade, ch. 3.

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 4$ 8 Sidney Chalhoub

dying in even greater numbers from diseases, such as tuberculosis, which

health officials were not prepared, or willing, to notice).
As the 1870s wore on, yellow fever had become the major question
concerning public health in Brazil, and in fact one of the main obstacles
to realising the political project which was gradually gaining the hearts
and minds of Brazilian planters: the idea of countering possible losses
from emancipation by flooding the labour market with European
immigrants. Even though the high point for European immigration to the
country would come only two decades later, the passing of the Free Birth
Law in 1871, with its unmistakable signs that slavery would eventually
come to an end even in Brazil, already found planters in Sao Paulo trying
to devise a plan for subsidised immigration. One of the defenders of the
proposal to subsidise European immigration in the early 1870s argued for
the desirability of creating a labour market situation in which ' workers
must search for landowners rather than landowners search for workers'. 37
To cut a long story short, what was happening in the 1870s was that
yellow fever, with its unfailing ravages among recently arrived
immigrants, was perceived as a hindrance to the planters' idea of
smoothing the transition from slave to 'free' labour through European
immigration. The destruction of the corti^os was necessary among other
things because they were associated with immigrants dying of yellow
fever, and because they gave the capital of the Empire — and also its main
port of entry - the reputation of a pesthole, thus discouraging potential
European immigrants from taking their chances in Brazil.
The political meaning of yellow fever in the 1870s can be gleaned from
the words of the chief sanitarian of the period himself. Pereira Rego makes
it quite clear, in the introduction to his history of epidemics in Brazil
published in 1873, that to combat yellow fever was to attempt to make
immigration a viable alternative. After a brief description of the
geographical location of the country and its climatic characteristics - an
introduction much in the style of the medical literature of the period - the
future Baron of Lavradio says that Brazil

has the potential for great destinies and should attract immigrants from all
countries...; [the country], however, is not usually preferred in European
emigrations... despite its liberal institutions and the protection and favours
granted to foreigners who decide to emigrate to Brazil.

One of the main reasons for this situation, he proceeds, is the 'unfair
37
For a history of the idea offloodingthe labour market with European immigrants, see
Michael Hall, 'The origins of mass immigration in Brazil, 1871-1914', unpubl. PhD
diss., Columbia University, 1969, chs. 3,4 and 5. See also George Reid Andrews, Slacks
and Whites in Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1SS8-19S8 (Madison, 1991), chs. 2 and 3. The quotation
is from Andrews, p. 58.

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 The Politics of Yellow Fever in Brazil 459

allegation' made abroad that Brazil had an insalubrious climate which

caused ' striking mortality among foreigners because of the pestilential
diseases that reign there'. He then remarks that yellow fever is 'the
terrifying ghost of emigration to Brazil, since the country has been
indicated by some writers as one of the places where this scourge more
often appears'.38
Perhaps more revealing is Pereira Rego's comparison, in the conclusion
of the same book, between cholera and yellow fever. Cholera was
described as a disease which chose its numerous victims from among
slaves and 'individuals of an inferior o r d e r ' - a clear reference to
freedmen and free people of colour in general. Therefore, it was disruptive
of agricultural and industrial labour and caused great property losses to
the affluent classes. Yellow fever, on the other hand, affected non-
acclimatised individuals, especially recently arrived immigrants. Thus, it
resulted in commercial losses and 'what is worse, in an obstacle to
immigration, which is necessary to bring us workers for the development
and prosperity of agriculture and industry, both still backward among us
because of the lack of immigrants suitable to the achievement of these
ends'. The conclusion is clear: first, since in the aftermath of the 1871 law
the country seemed to be moving away from slavery and towards some
still uncertain form of a ' free' labour market, cholera was the disease of
the past, of slavery and black workers; second, since the forthcoming
'free' labour market was increasingly associated with European mass
immigration to Brazil, yellow fever was the disease of the future, of wage
labour and white immigrant workers. In other words, yellow fever was
perceived as blocking the road to the country's achievement of the now
redefined goals of progress and civilisation.39

The whitening ideal

Brazilian government officials and medical men continued to talk about
yellow fever in environmental terms in the last decades of the nineteenth
century. They stopped short of engaging in exercises relating people's

38
R e g o , Memoria historica das epidemias de febre amarela e cholera-morbo, p p . 5—4. T h e
Brazilian doctors' case for the relationship between yellow fever and immigration is
well apprehended in H. Rey,' Notes sur la fievre jaune au Bresil d'apres les publications
recentes des medecins bresiliens', Archives de me'decine navale, Paris, vol. XXVIII (1877),
pp. 277-91, 572-92, 428-39. In Cuba as well, yellow fever 'in the last decades of the
nineteenth century (...) acquired new importance because of the obstacle it posed to
white immigration'; see Nancy Stepan, 'The Interplay Between Socio-economic
Factors and Medical Science: Yellow Fever Research, Cuba and the United States',
Social Studies of Science, vol. 8 (1978), p . 400.
39
Jose Pereira Rego, Memoria historica, pp. 218-19.

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 460 Sidney Chalhoub

different susceptibilities to disease to elaborate forms of racial determinism.

The real challenge for the student of racial ideology in Brazil, however,
is to recognise that the apparent absence of an elaborate racial terminology
does not mean the absence of racial meanings. As we move towards the
end of the nineteenth century, it becomes increasingly obvious that
Brazilian medical thought and sanitary policies were deeply informed by
a specific racial ideology - in Rio and Sao Paulo at the very least, they had
become active components in the making of the whitening ideal. All
efforts and resources were geared to yellow fever, while diseases such as
tuberculosis and smallpox, both of which physicians usually associated
with mestizos and poverty, were almost completely disregarded.40
In the city of Rio, tuberculosis killed relentlessly every year and
throughout each year, and I suspect that in the last decades of the century
it killed more than all the most visible epidemic diseases put together.
Nevertheless, not a single plan to combat the scourge was ever
implemented in the city. The reasons for this are complex, but the
argument that health officials would not know what to do in order to
bring tuberculosis under control does not hold. An evaluation of the
situation and the general outline of a plan to cope with it had been drafted
by Dr Paula Candido, the first president of the Board of Health, as early
as 1859, but neither the author nor anyone else seems to have ever given
any serious consideration to applying it.41 Furthermore, health officials

40
As Samuel Adamo thoroughly demonstrates, the federal government's public health
campaign in the first years of the twentieth century resulted in a significant decline in
mortality from infectious and contagious diseases; however, the benefits were
unequally distributed and high mortality rates continued to be the plight of the Afro-
Brazilian population in Rio; see Samuel A d a m o , ' The Broken Promise: Race, Health,
and Justice in Rio de Janeiro, 1890-1940', unpubl. P h D . diss., University of New
Mexico, 1983. In a comparative study of tuberculosis in Brazil and the USA, Dalila
Kiple shows that Brazilian doctors usually explained black people's greater vulnerability
to the disease in environmental terms, while N o r t h American medical men were more
likely to embrace 'Darwinian racial tenets' in dealing with the subject; however, both
medical communities ' m a d e the issue of healing incidental, if not irrelevant, to their
discussion', and little was done t o tame the disease among black people until well into
the twentieth century. See Dalila de Sousa Kiple, ' Darwin and Medical Perceptions of
the Black: a Comparative Study of the United States and Brazil, 1871-1918', unpubl.
P h D . diss., Bowling Green State University, 1987. As for the opinion that smallpox
was more rampant among slaves and 'people of colour', see Soeiro Guarany, ' D a
vacinacao e revacinagao n o Brasil, memoria apresentada a Academia Imperial de
Medicina d o Rio de Janeiro, a 16 de maio de 1863', Annaes Brasilienses de Medicina, vol.
I J (August 1863), p. 117.
41
See Re/ato'rio do Ministe'rio do Impe'rio, 1859, Anexo G , ' Relatorio d o Presidente da Junta
Central de Higiene Publica', part II, 'Reflexoes sobre a ti'sica pulmonar', pp. 6-12. F o r
a criticism of Candido's plan, on the grounds that it was t o o timid, see the article by
Bezerra de Meneses in Annaes Brasilienses de Medicina, no. 3 (May 1859). Candido's piece
clearly indicated that he thought the trouble lay in sanitary conditions in the

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 The Politics of Yellow Fever in Brazil 461

were in no better position to deal with yellow fever; nonetheless, they

spent decade after decade pushing, and failing, and trying again until they
finally succeeded. As for smallpox, the neglect was inexcusable. The
government knew exactly what had to be done; however, it handled the
public vaccination service in such an amateurish manner that by the turn
of the century its credibility had been damaged almost beyond repair, as
the urban revolt in 1904 would show. Vaccination posts were rare, laymen
in charge of it did not show up for work, and posts often ran out of
vaccination lymph. In addition, the population sometimes associated
vaccination with the appearance of smallpox epidemics and the spread of
syphilis - and the reports of the Instituto Vacfnico (Vaccination Institute)
leave no doubt that on occasions these things in fact happened. Meanwhile,
the well-to-do residents of Rio paid to be vaccinated by their private
doctors — preferably with animal lymph imported from Britain.42
Still, historians by now should be weary of thinking of racial ideologies
as 'things which have lives of their own'. 43 In trying to understand the
way in which yellow fever epidemics merged with the formation of the
whitening ideal in Brazil in the second half of the nineteenth century, a
decisive reference is no doubt the history of labour relations. As African
Brazilians and their allies deepened their struggles for the abolition of
slavery and the definition of new working conditions under freedom,
government officials in Rio and coffee planters scrambled to deal with the

workplace; however, he was rather hesitant in recommending strict government

vigilance of workshops and factories.
For the activities of the Vaccination Institute, see the collection 'Ministerio do
Imperio/Instituto Vaci'nico. Ofi'cios e documentos diversos', Arquivo National do Rio
de Janeiro. For the urban revolt against compulsory smallpox vaccination in Rio in 1904,
see, among others, Jose Murilo de Carvalho, Os bestiali^ados: 0 Rio de Janeiro e a
Republica que naofoi (Sao Paulo, 1987); Teresa Ann Meade, 'Community Protest in Rio
de Janeiro, Brazil, During the First Republic, 1890-1917', unpubl. PhD. diss., Rutgers
University, 1984; Jeffrey Needell, 'The Revolta Contra Vacina of 1904: the Revolt
Against "Modernization" in Belk-Epoque Rio de Janeiro', Hispanic American Historic
Review, vol. 67, no. 2 (May 1987); Nicolau Sevcenko, A revolta da vacina: mentes insanas
em corpos rebeldes (Sao Paulo, 1984). None of these studies, however, approaches the
question of the importance of the previous history of the vaccination service itself for
understanding the 1904 revolt.
What follows was somewhat inspired by the reading of Barbara Jeanne Fields,' Slavery,
Race and Ideology in the United States of America', New Left Review, no. 181
(May/June, 1990), pp. 95—118; Barbara Jeanne Fields, 'Ideology and Race in American
History', in J. Morgan Kousser, and James M. MacPherson (eds.), Region, Race and
Reconstruction (New York, 1982), pp. 143-77 and, in the same volume, Thomas C. Holt,
'"An Empire over the Mind": emancipation, race, and ideology in the British West
Indies and the American South', pp. 283-313.

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 462 Sidney Chalhoub

challenge to the politics of dominance which was characteristic of a slave

society. In the unfolding of these historical struggles, the planter class and
their allies gradually moved away from the idea of obtaining sup-
plementary cheap labour through immigration, with the ensuing
competition among workers, and shifted towards the idea of substituting
white European immigrants for Afro-Brazilian workers altogether.44 The
politics of yellow fever and disease control in general and the formation
of the whitening ideal in this period are to be seen as integral parts of this
historical process which was remaking labour relations in the country.
Although environmental language remained predominant among
Brazilian doctors and health officials at the turn of the century, they were
acting on the assumption that the political goal of disease control policies
was to whiten the population. Now vulnerable, if not to the language, at
least to the ultimate consequences of European and North American
scientific racism, Brazilians trod their own racist path: in fighting yellow
fever and disregarding diseases that affected black people, they actually set
out to change the environment in order to help 'nature'. And nature's work,
aided by miscegenation and immigration, was the quiet elimination of the
African heritage - that is, the heritage of the ' inferior race' - from
Brazilian society.
It may be significant that the best exposition of this racist framework
which I have found so far was spelled out by a Brazilian lawyer, not a
medical doctor. The occasion was to celebrate Oswaldo Cruz and his
successful campaign for the eradication of yellow fever from the nation's
capital; Rui Barbosa, an influential politician at the time, gave his
interpretation of the importance of yellow fever in recent Brazilian
history:

It is an evil, of which the negro race alone manages to be immune, a fact which
is only contradicted in the course of the most violet epidemics, and in its obituary,
in the centres where European immigration abounded, the contribution of
foreign nationals reached 92 percent of the total death toll. Sparing the African
element, an exterminator of Europeans, the yellow plague, negrophile and
xenophobic, attacked the existence of the nation in its marrow, in the very source
of the vital fluid which would regenerate its good African blood, since
immigration has come to purify our veins from the effects of primitive
44
See Michael Hall,' The Origins of Mass Immigration', chs. 3,4 and 5, and George Reid
Andrews, Blacks and Whites in Sao Paulo, chs. 2 and 3. For a history of racial ideas in
nineteenth-century Brazil which shows in a masterly way the interplay of racial
ideology and the struggle to redefine labour relations, see Celia M. Marinho de
Azevedo, Onda negra, medo branco. 0 negro no imaginario das elites: seculo XIX (Rio de
Janeiro, 1987). For a study which shows a shift from cultural to racial - 'scientific' -
stereotyping regarding African Brazilians in the press of the Province of Sao Paulo in
the second half of the nineteenth century, see Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, Retrato em branco
e negro: jornais, escravos e cidadaos em Sao Paulo no final do seculo XIX (Sao Paulo, 1987).

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 The Politics of Yellow Fever in Brazil 463

miscegenation, and it [the ' yellow plague'] gave us, in the eyes of the civilised
world, the airs of a slaughterhouse for the white race.45
This is forceful and straightforward language; and the message is clear.
I hope this paper is a further step in understanding how such a thing came
into being historically.
45
As cited in Regina Cele de A. Bodstein, 'Praticas sanitarias e classes populates do Rio
de Janeiro', Kevista do Rio de Janeiro, vol. 1, no. 4 (1986), pp. 42-3.

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