Medicine, Metaphor, and Art: Epidemics of Yellow Fever in Havana, Barcelona, and Buenos Aires, 1821-1901

This essay traces the zigzagging peregrinations of yellow fever, from its origins in West Africa to Cuba (via the transatlantic slave trade), then, from Cuba to Spain (via global commercial routes) and, later, southward to Buenos Aires (via Brazil). It examines the multiple meanings of the disease – be they mythic, metaphoric, or ideological – particularly through its entanglements with class, race, geography, and empire. Focusing on three port cities stalked by yellow fever throughout the nineteenth century: Havana, Barcelona, and Buenos Aires, it explores how artists imagined and represented the disease, elucidating the historical situations out of which these representations sprang, as well as offering a compelling example of what Susan Sontag theorises as the uses and abuses of illness as metaphor. By mapping artistic depictions of yellow fever from different periods and places, the essay engages with the disease’s intimate links with globality, inequality, and empire.