Science and medicine in the Old South

The American South before the Civil War was distinguished by a rural agricultural economy based on chattel slavery and in many places a moist warm climate favourable to infectious and parasitic diseases. These conditions led southerners to claim that the ante-bellum South was medically and scientifically distinctive, a viewpoint that is examined critically in this collection of essays. According to Ronald Numbers and Janet Numbers, using lists of eminent American scientists obtained in other studies, there were fewer southern scientists than might be expected from the South's proportion of the US population. Statistical analyses showed that the backwardness of southern science could be explained largely by its rural character. Thomas Dyer found that the interest of the University of Georgia in basic and applied science up to 1860 matched that of other southern and northern universities. Lester Stephens concluded that scientific societies in two southern cities functioned largely as exclusive social clubs. Brooks Holifield examined the genuine interest in science among some leading southern clergymen. William Scarborough's valuable essay on agricultural science found that southern newspapers and agricultural journals publicized new discoveries, but that southern farmers were more conservative than those elsewhere because of the South's rural and slave economy and society. A few planters made valuable contributions to scientific agriculture, but were hampered by the state of southern scientific and educational institutions. In another impressive chapter, Charles Dew shows that the southern iron industry failed to adopt new technology and became nationally uncompetitive by 1860. He attributes this to the unwillingness of the skilled slave iron workers to use the new technologies. The remainder of the book concerns southern medicine. In an excellent but too-brief epidemiological article, David Patterson shows that the southern climate was favourable to mosquitoes, worm eggs and larvae, and water-borne pathogenic microorganisms. Poverty was common, sanitation was poor, but nutrition was equal to that in the north. Slaves brought virulent forms of malaria, hookworm, and yellow fever from Africa that debilitated the white and native Indian populations. Patterson is the only contributor to describe regional differences within the South. James Cassedy's useful study examines the interests of southern physicians in the relationship between disease and southern topography, climate, and flora and fauna. He claims that "southern regional chauvinism" (p. 175) arose in the 1840s to defend slavery and to attract students to southern medical schools and subscribers to southern medical journals. John Warner argues that …