Ingrid Gessner: Yellow Fever Years: An Epidemiology of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2016.

• Antje Dallmann

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, several outbreaks of yellow fever haunted the early American republic. Before the general acceptance of the germ theory of disease toward the end of the nineteenth century and Walter Reid’s discovery of Aedes aegypti as vector of transmission in 1900, the etiology of yellow fever, a viral disease, was subject to speculation. Several medical-historical studies trace the impact of the disease in the US. Ingrid Gessner’s Yellow Fever Years likewise situates yellow fever narratives within the larger nineteenth-century political, social, and medical contexts of a changing US American society. This excellent study, however, is “not another medical history of yellow fever”. “The fictional and visual texts” under discussion, the author points out, “describe diseases as events that reflect wider cultural categories of nation, race, and gender”. Investigating the yellow fever theme in nineteenth-century discourses of nation-building and of imperial expansion, Gessner’s comprehensive discussion demonstrates how cultural and medical norms and interpretations shaped the perception, treatment, and further symbolizations of yellow fever and how they were in turn shaped by these symbolizations.