100 RüdigerKunow
61).Theveracityoftheseallegationshasneverbeenproven,butthisdid
not keep them from further inflaming sentiments among Caucasian and
African Americans. This controversy shows once again how responses
to a medical mass event were shaped by a "materialism of the
imaginary":nothingwasknownforcertainbutthisdidnotkeepanyone
fromactingasifitwere.
Asthis brief narrative has shown,yellow fever in Philadelphia 1793
was an eminently public disease during which human life, individual
and collective, came to be rigorously "governmentalized" (Athanasiou
145). Biology and governmentality became interchangeable rationales
so that human life in its precarious state was then becoming part of a
largerpoliticsoflife,^52 inwhichhealthconsiderationsweresaddledwith
implications coming from social and economic agendas. This was true
of the city of Philadelphia but also its larger geographical and political
perimeter. Throughout the epidemic, what Alan Kraut has in a
suggestive phrase called "the double helix of health and fear" (Silent
Travelers9) was an important catalyst for the emergence of a robust
sense ofInter-American precariousnesswhich imposed itself on the
strickencity.Thus,asidefromitstollinhumanlives,the1793epidemic
brought into public consciousness the ties that at that time connected
Philadelphia as a port city with the West Indies and other parts of
maritime central and South America. Long before the epidemic struck,
the interim capital of the United States had become part of a
hemispheric system, a way station in an unfolding political-economic
frameworkthatwasjustatthattimeundergoingsignificantchangesthat
would soon result in a growing ascendency of the newly independent
UnitedStatesoveritsneighborsfurtherSouth(Gould779).Inthisway,
disease,thefearofitasmuchastheactualdiseaseitself,hadapowerful
catalytic function: it set the terms by which the new U.S.-American
republic could experience and explain its independence (or the lack
thereof) from the South Atlantic hemisphere surrounding it. In other
words, the medical emergency generated a sense (but not necessarily a
full understanding) of "regional interconnectedness that was not
(^52) InDiscipline and Punish, Foucault gave a brief but detailed account of
plaguesasanoccasionfor"anorganizationindepthofsurveillanceandcontrol"
(198).