On Ideas as Actors: How Ideas about Yellow Fever Causality Shaped Public Health Policy Responses in 19th-Century Galveston

Abstract

This article uses debates regarding yellow fever causality among leading healers in 19th-century Galveston, Texas, U.S., as a means of exploring the extent to which ideas are social actors. That is, the analysis demonstrates that ideas about yellow fever causality shaped contemporaneous public health policy responses to yellow fever outbreaks in 19th-century Galveston. The article contributes to the growing literature documenting that contagionist and anticontagionist views were often assimilated, and also supports the historiography showing that the predisposing/exciting causes dichotomy is a more robust intellectual framework for understanding 19th-century attributions of disease causality.