4 ms·
How Yellow Fever Turned New Orleans into the 'City of the Dead'
- shasheene 8y agoGreat article with interesting historical insight. Thanks for posting! This part (and the slavery justification stuff) particularly stuck out to me: > "If you're unacclimated, you basically languish in professional and social purgatory," says Olivarius, who is writing a book about how the disease shaped the city's social structure. "Bosses will not hire clerks and bookkeepers who are not expressly acclimated. Women will not marry men not described as acclimated. You can't live in certain neighborhoods, and people will not rent rooms unless you're acclimated. Certain social circles will exclude you. And so this creates this hierarchy where you have people who are actively seeking to get sick.
- ip26 8y agoBut no matter how severe, or far-reaching an epidemic may be, Olivarius says, "Human beings are very comfortable at saying, 'It's not happening in my backyard, therefore it's not affecting me.'" I feel like the modern age, with our flood of news access, has basically demonstrated why. It's a coping mechanism. There are simply far too many terrible things going on in the world at any given moment, for any one person be able to concern themselves with every one of them.