Medicine and metaphor

Fever is a disease of heat and burning – the body’s natural thermostat going awry. Yellow fever, a viral infection transmitted by the bite of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, remained an intensely feared and poorly understood disease until 1881, when Cuban physician Carlos Finlay announced it was transmitted by an insect vector. This essay traces the z igzagging peregrinations of yellow fever, from its origins in West Africa to Cuba (via the transatlantic slave trade), then from Cuba to Spain (via global commercial routes), and later southward to Buenos Aires (via Brazil). It examines the multiple meanings of the disease – be they mythic, metaphoric, or ideological – particularly through its entanglements with class, race, geography, and empire. Focusing on three port cities stalked by yellow fever throughout the nineteenth century – Havana, Barcelona, and Buenos Aires – it explores how artists imagined and represented the disease, elucidating the historical situations out of which they sprang, as well as offering a compelling example of what Susan Sontag theorizes as the uses and abuses of illness as metaphor. By mapping artistic depictions of yellow fever from different periods and places, the essay engages with the disease’s intimate links with globality, inequality, and empire.