ABSTRACT
This chapter debates the historiographical perspectives that have dominated historical narratives of yellow fever in Latin America. Almost invariably, historians have assumed that past accounts of yellow fever refer to the same yellow fever that historians know and understand according to modern medicine. We identify the development of medical bacteriology as the watershed between old ideas and the new path that led to current notions of the fever – as caused by a microorganism, a virus. But no matter how we intend to historicize medical notions about the fever, most of us have actually avoided questions about what did ‘vômito preto’, black vomit, yellow fever or periodic fevers of the yellow fever variety refer to, according to contemporaries’ interpretations and worldviews. The historiography of yellow fever in Latin America conveys the assumption that when historians find these terms in documents produced by doctors and policy-makers at any moment or location, those expressions refer invariably to one and the same yellow fever: acute viral haemorrhagic disease transmitted by infected mosquitoes and distinguishable thanks to salient symptoms such as jaundice, black vomit and fever. The unintended consequence of this apparently unproblematic decision is that we ignore one of the fundamental questions related to studying diseases historically: the contentious character of medical knowledge, hence of the things designated by it. The aim of this chapter is to analyse the historiographical approach to yellow fever, particularly the one that takes for granted current medical knowledge and performs retrospective diagnosis – an approach that could be named presentism in the historiography of yellow fever. 1 The varied narratives that have been produced from such a standpoint are summarized here. Finally, a brief exposition of some of the perspectives and themes that could help us to circumvent such presentism is discussed in the last part of this chapter.
