Arner completed and defended her dissertation, "The Malady of Revolutions: Yellow Fever in the Atlantic World, 1793-1828," on June 27, 2014. Her article "Making Global Commerce into International Health Diplomacy: Consuls and Disease Control in the Age of Revolutions" was published in the Journal of World History in December 2013. She has just begun a three-year postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University.
Katherine Arner
Ph.D. CandidateProgram in the History of Science, Medicine and TechnologyJohns Hopkins University
Shaped by Fever, Commerce and War: American Medicine and Public Health in the Era of Atlantic Revolutions
Abstract: The story of early national American medicine and public health has centered on either domestic developments or Americans' relations to European centers like Edinburgh, London or Paris. This picture becomes much more complex when we look to epidemiological, political and commercial phenomena in the larger Atlantic world. My dissertation examines the role of post-Independence entanglements with European imperial powers, Haitian and French Revolutions and Napoleonic Wars in addition to the pressing international problem of yellow fever that was a product of these developments. All of these phenomena fostered increasing movements of pathogens, people and ideas between the US and other parts of the world. Through these patterns, inhabitants of the new nation cultivated networks and collaborations with actors outside of the US and outside of European centers. It was also this context that facilitated the country’s engagement with international disease control politics and models of disease control abroad even prior to the late nineteenth and twentieth century. Read Katherine's report on her PACHS-sponsored research here.
Updates
will have an article published, "Making Global Commerce into Health Diplomacy: Consuls and Commercial Agents in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions," in the upcoming December special issue of the Journal of World History, The State and the Epidemiological Transition.