Maladies of Empire by Jim Downs

Author:Jim Downs [Downs, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780674971721
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2021-09-06T18:30:00+00:00

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Learning about the spread of infectious disease and developing preventive measures and treatments depended on imbalances of power such as those created by slavery, colonialism, and war. During the nineteenth century, the medical community understood this to be true. This kind of imbalance made possible Florence Nightingale’s collection of statistics from India and from Crimean War hospitals, as well as Gavin Milroy’s work in Jamaica and the army of physicians employed by the USSC. It also had a profound effect on Confederate doctors during the Civil War. They witnessed how the war produced a biological crisis that led to the spread of infectious disease and how it undermined soldiers’ health. Like the USSC, the British Sanitary Commission, and other European medical authorities, the Confederacy recognized the need to investigate and document the spread of infectious disease. Confederate doctors studied accidental, or “spurious,” vaccinations and reported on the consequences of these failed procedures.

In fact, their efforts to do so led Confederate doctors not only to detail their experiences during the war but also to provide accounts of their work before the war unfolded. Similar to the ways that military bureaucracy unwittingly exposed crucial details about subjugated peoples in the far reaches of the British Empire from the Caribbean to India to West Africa, Southern military authorities’ requests for doctors to report on their work, document their observations, and explain their rationale revealed the common practice of using enslaved children to harvest vaccine matter. The actual reporting of this practice within the Confederate bureaucracy disclosed an antebellum practice that otherwise might have evaded documentation.32

The Civil War created a massive bureaucracy—like that of the British Empire—that recorded and systematized practices that later became archived and preserved. The Confederate bureaucracy made visible the practice of using enslaved infants and children to harvest vaccine matter. In February 1864, in response to continuing smallpox outbreaks, the Confederate surgeon general’s office requested that hospital medical directors “promptly assign one Asst Surg in each of the larger cities of the Confederacy to the temporary & special duty of vaccinating gratis, in such cities & precincts, all healthy children, white & black, who have not been properly vaccinated.”33

After receiving the order, Dr. James Bolton, who was based in Richmond, “traveled four weeks in the interior of Virginia, vaccinating whites and negroes.” Bolton later “retraced his steps for the purpose of gathering the crusts”—the scabs that formed at the vaccination site and would be used for vaccinating others. In a letter reprinted in a report by the Confederate doctor Joseph Jones, Bolton wrote that “the result of this expedition was about eight hundred crusts, mostly from healthy negro children.” Since Bolton’s expedition throughout Civil War Virginia took place while slavery remained in place under Confederate rule, the enslaved children and their families would have had little opportunity to resist these procedures. Bolton reported that only one case presented “abnormal phenomena”: the face and vaccinated arm of a “mulatto” child of “strumous [scrofulous] appearance” were “covered with impetigo.”34 As

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