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It is no exaggeration to say that theHankey, a small British ship that circled the Atlantic in 1792 and 1793, transformed the history of the Atlantic world. This extraordinary book uncovers the long-forgotten story of theHankey, from its altruistic beginnings to its disastrous end, and describes the ship's fateful impact upon people from West Africa to Philadelphia, Haiti to London. Billy G. Smith chased the story of theHankeyfrom archive to archive across several continents, and he now brings back to light a saga that continues to haunt the modern world. It began with a group of high-minded British colonists who planned to establish a colony free of slavery in West Africa. With the colony failing, the ship set sail for the Caribbean and then North America, carrying, as it turned out, mosquitoes infected with yellow fever. The resulting pandemic as theHankeytraveled from one port to the next was catastrophic. In the United States, tens of thousands died in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Charleston. The few survivors on theHankeyeventually limped back to London, hopes dashed and numbers decimated. Smith links the voyage and its deadly cargo to some of the most significant events of the era-the success of the Haitian slave revolution, Napoleon's decision to sell the Louisiana Territory, a change in the geopolitical situation of the new United States-and spins a riveting tale of unintended consequences and the legacy of slavery that will not die.

\" It is no exaggeration to say that the Hankey, a small British ship that circled the Atlantic in 1792 and 1793, transformed the history of the Atlantic world. This extraordinary book uncovers the long-forgotten story of the Hankey, from its altruistic beginnings to its disastrous end, and describes the ship's fateful impact upon people from West Africa to Philadelphia, Haiti to London. Billy G. Smith chased the story of the Hankey from archive to archive across several continents, and he now brings back to light a saga that continues to haunt the modern world. It began with a group of high-minded British colonists who planned to establish a colony free of slavery in West Africa. With the colony failing, the ship set sail for the Caribbean and then North America, carrying, as it turned out, mosquitoes infected with yellow fever. The resulting pandemic as the Hankey traveled from one port to the next was catastrophic. In the United States, tens of thousands died in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Charleston. The few survivors on the Hankey eventually limped back to London, hopes dashed and numbers decimated. Smith links the voyage and its deadly cargo to some of the most significant events of the era-the success of the Haitian slave revolution, Napoleon's decision to sell the Louisiana Territory, a change in the geopolitical situation of the new United States-and spins a riveting tale of unintended consequences and the legacy of slavery that will not die\"-- Provided by publisher.

In this article, I focus on three Jewish healers who worked in Philadelphia and New York during two yellow fever epidemics that plagued the United States during the eighteenth century (one in 1793 and another in 1798): David Cohen Nassy (1747-1806), Matthias Nassy (ca. 1770-?), and Walter Jonas Judah (1778-98). For each, I focus not only on their actual roles as healers but also on different people's portrayals of \"Jewish\" approaches to healing at the time. While white Protestants sometimes portrayed Jewishness and professionalism as at odds, all three men and their communities emphasized the ways that their medical service benefitted the state. In the 1790s, Jewish enfranchisement was a relatively new phenomenon, with Jews having only received the vote in Philadelphia in 1790, and Jews having lost and regained the vote in New York in the eighteenth century. Thus, these Jewish medics' self-fashioning took part in the larger- and still ongoing-debates over emancipation: could Jews in general, and Jewish medics in particular, heal the young nation or would their distinctiveness fester like a raw wound?

The history of Latin America, the history of disease, medicine, and public health, and global history are deeply intertwined, but the intersection of these three fields has not yet attracted sustained attention from historians. Recent developments in the historiography of disease, medicine, and public health in Latin America suggest, however, that a distinctive, global approach to the topic is beginning to emerge. This essay identifies the distinguishing characteristic of this approach as an attentiveness to transfers of contagions, cures, and medical knowledge from Latin America to the rest of the world and then summarizes a few episodes that demonstrate its promise. While national as well as colonial and neocolonial histories of Latin America have made important contributions to our understanding, works taking the global approach have the potential to contribute more directly to the decentering of the global history of disease, medicine, and public health.

A month later, he began writing Ormond; or, The Secret Witness} A sprawling narrative of conspiracy and contagion, Ormond was the first of Brown's published novels to revisit the Philadelphia he knew in 1793: a community threatened not only by disease, but by the perceived collapse of established social, political, and racial hierarchies. In so doing, I demonstrate how stories of disease resistance-what we now call \"immunity\"-mirror other forms of political resistance in France and Saint Domingue during the so-called \"age of democratic revolutions.\" Just as Silva argues that \"the immunological distinctions that settlers observed between themselves and Native Americans were crucial to how they understood their place in the New World,\" I argue that perceived immunological distinctions between United States citizens, French immigrants, and black persons revised existing definitions of political belonging in the new nation (16). By examining both Ormond and Arthur Mervyn through an immunological lens, I demonstrate how epidemic outbreaks in the 1790s complicated political boundaries between native and foreign, or citizen and non-citizen, in the early republic. [...]an approach to interpreting Brown's novels also owes a debt to Priscilla Wald, who coined the term \"outbreak narrative\" to define a genre of \"contradictory but compelling [stories] of the perils of human interdependence and the triumph of human connection\" in the face of disease outbreaks. In what follows, I borrow Wald's notion of \"imagined immunities\" (a phrase clearly indebted to Benedict Anderson's seminal Imagined Communities) to identify an immunological foundation for the communities depicted in Ormond and,...

Epidemics of infectious disease have always played a role in American history, and such epidemics are sited in time and place and configured in terms of ecology and demography, available medical knowledge, and cultural values and collective experience. The mix of these variables has changed dramatically since the theocratic world of 17th-century New England, but the relevance of each remains. Avian influenza already exists virtually in Western society in terms of planning, global networks, laboratory research, social expectations, media representations, and a specific shared history based on the memory of the 1918 influenza pandemic.

This paper touches on patterns of federal government involvement in the health sector since the late 18th century to the present and speculates on its role in the early decades of the 21st century. Throughout the history of the US, government involvement in the health sector came only in the face of crisis, only when there was widespread consensus, and only through sustained leadership. One of the first health-related acts of Congress came about as a matter of interstate commerce regarding the dilemma as to what to do about treating merchant seamen who had no affiliation with any state. Further federal actions were implemented to address epidemics, such as from yellow fever, that traveled from state to state through commercial ships. Each federal action was met with concern and resistance from states' rights advocates, who asserted that the health of the public was best left to the states and localities. It was not until the early part of the 20th century that a concern for social well-being, not merely commerce, drove the agenda for public health action. Two separate campaigns for national health insurance, as well as a rapid expansion of programs to serve the specific health needs of specific populations, led finally to the introduction of Medicaid and Medicare in the 1960s, the most dramatic example of government intervention in shaping the personal health care delivery system in the latter half of the 20th century. As health costs continued to rise and more and more Americans lacked adequate health insurance, a perceived crisis led President Clinton to launch his 1993 campaign to insure every American--the third attempt in this century to provide universal coverage. While the crisis was perceived by many, there was no consensus on action, and leadership outside government was missing. Today, the health care crisis still looms. Despite an economic boom, 1 million Americans lose their health insurance each year, with 41 million Americans, or 15% of the population, lacking coverage. Private premiums are going up again as federal programs are capped and the lack of a federal framework for quality assurance leads to growing problems of access and quality that will need to be addressed as we enter the 21st century. What role will government play?