Response To Kenneth Kiple - response to article by Kenneth Kiple in this issue, p. 969 - Brief Article

Journal of Social History, Summer, 2001 by Sheldon Watts

In his recent book, In the Blood: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), Melbourne Tapper convincingly demonstrates the difficulty which Caucasian medical men, historians and anthropologists have had in accepting that non-Africans have sometimes suffered from sickle cell anemia--a disease that the white experts long supposed was unique to Africans. In his response to my article, Kiple does indeed state that he no longer adheres to this particular view. However he is strangely reluctant to give up the rather similar nineteenth century Caucasian-generated notion that Africans have some peculiar ability to resist yellow fever. To support his contention, in his response he makes an analogy with acquired immunity to malaria.

Unfortunately Professor Kiple has not kept up with the current medical literature. The Lancet vol. 356, Sept. 23, 2000, p. 1046 (and earlier authoritative sources) clearly states that: "Surprisingly, the actual determinants of acquired immunity [to malaria] are not known." It is reasonable to suggest that the same situation pertains in the case of yellow fever.

The complexity of the yellow fever situation was further deepened in 1977 with the discovery that the eggs of the host mosquito could (as I stated) "host the living yellow fever virus for a considerable length of time" This discovery (not mentioned by Kiple) renders much of his discussion about the temperatures etc. required to keep mosquitoes alive obsolete. Looked at from a global perspective, obsolescence also characterizes other parts of Kiple's work on yellow fever.

Nowhere in his response does Professor Kiple show he is aware that one of the first tasks of an historian is to assess the nature of the written evidence left over from the past which she/he uses: who wrote it?; for what purpose was it written?; what were the biases and prejudices of the authors?; what, if anything does this evidence tell us about past reality, as opposed to the mind-set of the authors? Kiple does not assess the credibility of his 19th and 20th century sources. Then too he states that "the notion of an 'old-guy' conspiracy guarding a non-existent orthodoxy is comical". Doubtless Khaled Bloom (The Mississippi Valley's Great Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878) regarded it as "comical" to be rapped over the knuckles by established scholar Todd Savitt in the American Historical Review Dec. 1995, p. 1698 for omitting to mention "the current discussion among scholars ... about the resistance of African Americans to yellow fever" or to mention "secondary sources". Given the current situation, Khaled Bloo m was very wise. It is interesting to notice that Kiple choose to deny that he and his yellow fever thesis are racist three times in the opening paragraphs of his response: in my own article I did not use this loaded word.

Professor Kiple apparently does not realize that most historians now recognize that one of their principal roles is to ask open-ended questions about the past, recognizing that they may well never be able to come up with definite answers about actual past reality. He also does not realize that the days have now come to an end when experts resident in the West could expect to remain unchallenged when making sweeping generalizations about the disease susceptibilities of people living in the Non-West.

Abstract: Kenneth F. Kiple, "Response to Sheldon Watts, 'Yellow Fever Immunities in West Africa and the Americas in the Age of Slavery and Beyond: A Reappraisal'"

Yellow fever immunities are generally acquired, but individuals whose roots lie in areas of endemic yellow fever may also have been equipped with some sort of innate resistance as indicated by historical data from seventeenth-century Cuba, and Antigua and the United States during the nineteenth-century. Those that seem to have possessed this ability were of African descent but born in the New World where, for a variety of reasons, they would not have had any more opportunity than white counterparts to acquire immunity to yellow fever. Nonetheless, they fared much better with the disease. Professor Watts professes to spy racism in this, as yet, inexplicable differential resistance to yellow fever. Although a student of epidemics, he does not seem to understand that different peoples have historically reacted differently to disease exposure because of the physical environments that forged them.