The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture

Volume 22: Science and Medicine

James G. Thomas, Charles Reagan Wilson, James G. Thomas Jr., Charles Reagan Wilson, Charles Reagan Wilson

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780807837436
• Topic: Ciencias biológicas
• Subtopic: Ciencias en general

Science and medicine have been critical to southern history and the formation of southern culture. For three centuries, scientists in the South have documented the lush natural world around them and set a lasting tradition of inquiry. The medical history of the region, however, has been at times tragic. Disease, death, and generations of poor health have been the legacy of slavery, the plantation economy, rural life, and poorly planned cities. The essays in this volume explore this legacy as well as recent developments in technology, research, and medicine in the South.
Subjects include natural history, slave health, medicine in the Civil War, public health, eugenics, HIV/AIDS, environmental health, and the rise of research institutions and hospitals, to name but a few. With 38 thematic essays, 44 topical entries, and a comprehensive overview essay, this volume offers an authoritative reference to science and medicine in the American South.

SCIENCE AND MEDICINE

Although little noticed by the myriad students of the South, science and medicine have been important and instructive components of southern culture. On one level, they have contributed to social progress. On another, they have been barometers for gauging intellectual life. The South’s experience in these areas also sheds valuable light on the question of southern distinctiveness, providing additional support for the contention that regional separateness has had a retarding effect on cultural development.

Colonial South. An interest in science was part of the cultural baggage that the first colonists brought to the South. This interest was fed and intensified by the seemingly insatiable curiosity of Europeans regarding the natural life and products of the New World. Consequently, from the earliest days of colonization the pursuit of science was a prominent feature of southern life.

Throughout the colonial period and into the 19th century, science was generally divided into two broad categories—natural philosophy (the physical sciences) and natural history (the natural sciences). The former was concerned largely with the verification of existing scientific principles and the latter with the observation, collection, and classification of the phenomena of the natural world. Because of the physical and intellectual limitations of their frontier setting, colonial Americans were ill prepared to do much in natural philosophy, but they were ideally situated to excel in natural history. Their research in natural history set a pattern of activity that dominated American science for three centuries.

Motivated by the irresistible appeal of the lush, often exotic, natural world that surrounded them as well as by requests for assistance from English and European students of nature eager for New World botanical, zoological, and mineral specimens for their research and personal collections, hundreds of early southerners became actively involved in natural history. Most of them served as field collectors for Europeans. By the late colonial period, a few became highly competent scientists and, as respected members of the international circle of natural historians, made contributions to scientific advancement. The most important figures in southern natural history in the 17th century were John Clayton I and John Banister and, in the 18th, Mark Catesby, John Clayton II, John Mitchell, and Alexander Garden. Garden, a Charleston physician, was perhaps the most accomplished and best known of the group.

The activities and accomplishments of the early South’s natural historians were highly significant: they made the region, along with the middle colonies, the colonial leader in the study of the American natural world; they played an indispensable role in filling in the New World book of nature and thus contributed to the advancement of Western science; and they helped lay the foundation for American science.

The medical story of the early South was not nearly so bright or promising. It was in fact tragic. Disease and death were constant companions of colonists everywhere, but especially in the South. Here, health hazards, ranging from endemic “ague” (chills and fever) and “flux” (dysentery) to epidemic outbreaks of smallpox and yellow fever, were at their worst. It is easy to see why the southern colonists were less healthy. “Seasoning,” or becoming acclimated to the region’s semitropical climate, was the source of extreme morbidity and mortality. Moreover, because of an environment that encouraged insect life, a general disregard for the draining of swamps, and the steady influx of black carriers with the rise of slavery, malaria—early America’s most dangerous endemic disorder—tightened its hold on the South in the 18th century as it began to disappear from New England. Southern forms of the disease were more debilitating and deadly than those that prevailed elsewhere in the colonies. Finally, the medical reforms of the late colonial period that improved health—more and better-trained physicians, therapeutic advancements (e.g., the use of variolation to prevent smallpox and cinchona bark to control malaria), and the gradual appearance of regional medical institutions—such as schools, societies, and licensing—made less headway in the South than elsewhere.

As the health picture of the South suggests, the American colonies exhibited regional distinctions quite early because of the diversity of colonizing experiences and New World conditions. But while New England and the middle colonies became recognizable colonial divisions, the southern colonies showed the greatest cultural diversity. Indeed, during the century and a half between the settlement of Jamestown and the outbreak of the Revolution, the seeds of southern distinctiveness were planted, and the first shoots sent up. Such regional influences encouraged a separate southern identity. The colonial South’s first European settlers transplanted the social model of the English country gentleman to the New World and tried to follow it. They found favorable climatic and geographic conditions and established a plantation economy based on slavery and a staple-crop system.

Although sectional identity had little immediate meaning for the principal areas of regional life, the factors that underpinned it boded ill in the cases of science and medicine. Agrarianism and the plantation system, for example, fostered ruralism and a sparse pattern of settlement that discouraged and retarded urbanization, with its greater opportunities for intellectual contact and its nurturing environment for societies, journals, and other institutions for the promotion of science. The poor health of the South was in large measure attributable to the social consequences of the region’s unswerving devotion to a way of life based on slavery and the plantation economy.

Old South. Southern colonists on the eve of the Revolution were no more devoted to sectionalism than those in New England and the middle colonies. In fact, after the break with England, they were among the most strident cultural nationalists and celebrated America’s special destiny. Independence and nationhood, however, provided the impetus for the transformation of the embryonic South into the sectional South. This unintended, and largely unconscious, historical process was the result of growing inconsistencies between the southern way of life and emerging national patterns that became increasingly obvious after independence. None was more glaring than the South’s slave-based economic system and its underlying racism, which stood in contradiction to the philosophy of the Revolution and the idealism of the early Republic. Forced to choose, white southerners rejected freedom and equality for slavery and racism. Such unsettling experiences led, by the end of the 18th century, to the emergence of a southern sectional consciousness—the First South. After 1820 a sense of grievance and feelings of defensiveness united white southerners as never before and pushed them further out of the national mainstream. This was the Old South, the supreme expression of southern distinctiveness. Science and medicine, like all of southern life, bore the imprint of the South’s sectional philosophy.

Reflecting the cultural nationalism of the era, science in the early national period was characterized by the establishment and shaping of institutions and attitudes aimed at ending America’s intellectual subservience to Europe. Among the achievements of the period were the establishment of new schools and the improvement of existing ones, the founding of scientific societies and journals, and the building of museums and herbaria. As the result of these steps, the United States by 1830 had become a junior partner with Europe in science and had started down the path that would lead to eventual leadership in the scientific world. The South’s leaders of science supported and contributed to the drive for national scientific independence. In fact, Thomas Jefferson, the region’s best-known scientist of the early national period, was crucial to the quest for a first-rate American science. Although Jefferson was not a great scientist, his influence permeated the pursuit of science nationwide, and he was a tower of strength to all interested in science.

America’s striving for scientific respectability coincided with the maturing of Western science. Indeed, the 19th century was a golden age for science. During this century, science came of age and established its utility for social progress. The result was a veritable cult of science that affected every aspect of life. The United States, while overshadowed by the scientific leaders in Europe, was actively involved in the modernization of science.

Between 1820 and 1860, the four decades that are generally associated with the Old South, all parts of the country did not participate equally in the advancement of American science: the Northeast was the clear leader, the West contributed the least, and the South occupied an intermediate position. After performing splendidly in the colonial period, the South fell behind the Northeast in science after the Revolution. The South’s comparative lag in science was seen in a variety of ways, including the production of fewer scientists than the northern and middle states, a slower pace of institutional development for the support of science, a lower level of scientific activity, and a less progressive attitude toward science.

Reasons for the region’s declining national position ranged from agrarianism to the capitulation of the South to evangelical Protestantism and the defensiveness that accompanied mounting sectional tensions. These forces retarded the growth of institutions for the pursuit of science and created a climate of opinion that inhibited the free inquiry crucial to scientific advancement.

For all its problems, limitations, and comparative lag, science occupied a prominent place in antebellum southern culture. Natural history continued to be the dominant type of scientific activity. Although leadership in this area had shifted to the North by the advent of the Old South, southern contributions to the advancement of natural history were extensive and important. Students of the natural world were to be found throughout the region. Among those of note were William B. Rogers in Virginia, Elisha Mitchell and Moses A. Curtis in North Carolina, Gerard Troost in Tennessee, Charles W. Short in Kentucky, Alvan W. Chapman in Florida, John L. Riddell in Louisiana, and Gideon Lincecum on the Texas frontier.

The greatest activity in natural history was concentrated in the Charleston area. Long the chief center of southern science, this city and its environs were home to some of the most outstanding scientific figures of the Old South, such as Stephen Elliott, John Bachman, John E. Holbrook, and Henry William Ravenel. So many active students of science made Charleston the Old South’s most important scientific community. This remarkable group’s pursuit of science was nurtured by the Charleston Museum, one of the nation’s oldest and most important collections of natural history specimens, and the Elliott Society of Natural History, one of two noteworthy scientific societies in the Old South, the other being the New Orleans Academy of Sciences.

When compared with its outstanding performance in natural history, the Old South’s showing in the pure sciences was strikingly lackluster. This situation was the result of a combination of factors: the absence of a tradition of important activity and accomplishment in pure science, the low level of professionalization and institutional development that characterized southern science, and cultural considerations. The cumulative effect was the perpetuation of the South’s preoccupation with the collection, description, and classification of natural phenomena and the relegation of experimental research to the periphery of scholarship.

Like Americans everywhere, antebellum southerners were keenly interested in the practical applications of science. Applied science in the Old South largely involved attempts to bring science to bear on the region’s mounting agricultural problems toward the end of the era. The highly acclaimed research of Edmund Ruffin in soil chemistry is a case in point.

Like science, medicine in the antebellum South exhibited unmistakable regional characteristics. By the emergence of the Old South, a distinctive southern health picture was evident. It was the worst in the nation. So poor was the state of health in the region that northern life insurance companies charged their southern policyholders higher premiums. Malaria remained endemic and was the principal cause of disability and death. Residents of the southern port cities and the surrounding countryside lived in fear of yellow fever, which became a southern disease in the 19th century. New Orleans, the Old South’s largest city, was popularly known as “the graveyard of the Southwest” because of its frightful mortality rate (nearly three times that of Philadelphia and New York). Infant mortality rates in the South were the highest in the nation. In addition, it is estimated that as many as half of all southern children suffered from hookworm infection, a condition not diagnosed until the opening years of the 20th century. Finally, inadequate diets, poor housing, unhealthy quarters, and hazardous working conditions exacted a heavy toll on the health of the South’s large slave population.

The Old South’s health problems were the result of environmental and cultural factors. Climate and frontier conditions in the developing region, in conjunction with slavery, combined to account for the continued presence of malaria. The insect vectors of yellow fever and typhoid fever also thrived. In addition to fostering insect life, the long, hot summers made the preservation of food difficult, increased sanitary problems, and encouraged going barefoot, a habit associated with the spread of hookworm.

The growing cultural lag that increasingly set the South apart from the more progressive North contributed to regional health problems in a variety of ways. The low level of southern education, the lowest in the nation, clearly complicated the health picture. Nationwide, the “heroic” procedures of physicians were questioned during the first half of the 19th century, a development that encouraged the reliance on traditional healers and self-dosage with patent medicines. The rural and undereducated southerners were particularly prone to resort to these health-threatening practices. The absence of a social conscience on the part of the dominant planter class also had an adverse effect on health. Finally, institutions for the advancement of medicine, such as schools and journals, were, like those in science, slow to appear in the overwhelmingly rural South, and those that were founded faced a difficult struggle for survival. The few that did survive were inferior to those in the North. The rise of southern medical nationalism, or states’ rights medicine, did little, despite its rhetoric, to change this situation. The product of regional patterns of disease and sectional tensions, states’ rights medicine stressed the uniqueness of the South’s medical problems and the subsequent need for southern-trained physicians and a southern medical literature. Although the desire to improve the practice of medicine in the region was indisputably one of its goals, southern medical nationalism, like the scientific racism of Josiah C. Nott and others, was primarily a defense of the civilization of the Old South. Consequently, it contributed more to sectionalism than to medical reform.

Although easily overlooked because of the health problems of the region, the antebellum South’s strides in surgery contributed significantly to the rise of modern medicine. Two southerners—Ephraim McDowell and J. Marion Sims—achieved international acclaim in operative obstetrics and gynecology. The former, while practicing on the Kentucky frontier in 1808, performed the first successful ovariotomy, pioneering abdominal surgery. The latter, an Alabama surgeon, used slave women as subjects to perfect, in the 1840s, the initial procedure for the treatment of vesicovaginal fistula, a major breakthrough in gynecology. The third southerner who contributed to the birth of American surgery was Crawford W. Long, a small-town Georgia physician who was the first to use ether as a surgical anesthesia in 1842, helping to launch a new age of painless surgery.

Civil War. The culture of the Old South was inhospitable to scientific inquiry and threatening to health, but the region’s scientists and physicians closed ranks with their countrymen to defend it against all perceived enemies. In 1861, when the South withdrew from the Union, they pledged their lives and fortunes to the new Confederate nation.

The Civil War was not a scientific war. Neither the North nor the South used scientific talent in ways that led to new or drastically improved weapons that altered tactics and strategy on the battlefield. Still, each side made extensive use of scientists. The North did considerably better than the South in this area. Prominent scientists were consciously incorporated into the northern war effort in an advisory capacity. In the South, they were engaged as problem solvers. The Confederacy’s failure to devise a science policy is attributable to the many and pressing problems to be overcome in order to wage war and the popular perception of scientists as problem solvers in the South.

Scientists in the southern war effort worked in the government-run munitions industry, primarily in the War Department’s Ordnance Bureau. Headed by Josiah Gorgas, this agency was responsible for the Confederacy’s supply of war materiel. Gorgas and his assistants accomplished the near impossible, buildin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Science and Medicine
• Copyright Page
• Epigraph
• CONTENTS
• GENERAL INTRODUCTION
• INTRODUCTION
• SCIENCE AND MEDICINE
• INDEX OF CONTRIBUTORS
• INDEX