96 RüdigerKunow
worlds. And while it was at that time still too early to speak about an
Americanempire,citymerchantsandHamiltonianpoliticianswerebusy
buildingitseconomicbasebyengaginginasteadilygrowingandhighly
profitabletrade.
Small wonder then, that hemisphere considerations also shaped to a
great degree the medico-social debate about the etiology of the disease
and its treatment. This intense and often acerbic debate pitted localist
explanations against translocal, hemispheric ones. Localists (among
them Dr. Benjamin Rush, the most celebrated U.S.-American physician
at that time) argued that the yellow fever outbreaks were the result of
poor sanitation all over the city, producing dangerous effluvia from
stagnantlocalwaters(so-calledmiasmata)whichworkedintandemwith
unhealthy climatic conditions. Their opponents from the other camp,
among them the Philadelphia College of Physicians, suggested that the
disease had come to the city from the outside, namely by the newly
arrived refugees from Saint Domingue.^46 As we know now, both sides
were to a certain degree right, because being a vector-born infectious
disease, yellow fever is transmitted between humans by bites from
infected mosquitos. After being introduced into a new and unwitting
human host without an acquired immunity, the virus begins replicating
andfromtheretheinfectionprocessbeginsanew.
Moreimportantly,theargumentsexchangedinthisdisputereiterated
in medical terms the larger political issues of the Republican vs.
Federalist debate. Federalists, in order to safeguard the immunity
(political and otherwise) of the fledgling United States from the
infectious diseases spreading elsewhere in the Inter-American
hemisphere and to protect the city against economic competition from
the French-dominated Caribbean islands, demanded that a whole-sale
embargo be imposed againsttradewith the French coloniesthere.^47 The
(^46) FordetailsseePernickwhoexplainsthatimportationistswentto somelength
to utilize the political benefits of such a disease model: "Reaching the farthest
extremeofthisargument,oneimportationistassertedin1799thatthedoctrineof
domestic fevers was 'treason,' perhaps hoping that the Alien and Sedition Acts
gave the Federalists the power to deport foreign diseases along with foreign
agitators"(570).
(^47) Furthermore, they believed that Republicans had aided and abetted the
outbreak in order to discredit big city life and to create an atmosphere in which