Book presentation of 'The Yellow Demon of Fever. Fighting Disease in the Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade', by Manuel Barcia
The UK celebrates Black History Month annually throughout October. The Instituto Cervantes in Leeds and Manchester will join in theis recognition and for this reason, they have invited the historian Manuel Barcia, Professor and Chair of Global History from the University of Leeds, to introduce his latest book, The Yellow Demon of Fever. Fighting Disease in the Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade (Yale University Press, 2020), a pioneering story about how agents involved in one way or another in the slave trade influenced the growth and spread of medical knowledge. As the slave trade brought Europeans, Africans, and Americans into contact, diseases were traded along with human lives.
In his book, Manuel Barcia examines the battle waged against disease, where traders fought against loss of profits while enslaved Africans fought for survival. Although efforts to control disease and stop epidemics from spreading brought little success, the medical knowledge generated by people on both sides of the conflict contributed to momentous change in the medical cultures of the Atlantic world.