Book Talk: The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the 19th-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade

As the slave trade brought Europeans, Africans, and Americans into contact, diseases were traded along with human lives. Author Manuel Barcia and David Blight, Director of The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at the MacMillan Center, discuss the battle waged against disease, where traders fought against loss of profits while enslaved Africans fought for survival. Although efforts to control disease and stop epidemics from spreading brought little success, the medical knowledge generated by people on both sides of the conflict contributed to momentous change in the medical cultures of the Atlantic world.   View Video

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