The collective medical geography of the Gulf South is the latest topic in the Public Health in the U.S. and Global South series of the online journal Southern Spaces, published by Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS).
The article explores the topic through examination of 19-century travel and settlement writing published in the German-speaking states of northern Europe. Author Paul Warden, a history graduate student at the University of California-Santa Barbara, finds a strong correlation between the discourse of medical geography and German settlement patterns. In his article, he also raises questions about longstanding assumptions regarding the presence of slavery as the determining factor in German settlement.
Southern Spaces’ Public Health in the U.S. and Global South collection features interdisciplinary, multimedia publications examining the relationship between public health and specific geographies — both real and imagined — in and across the U.S. and global South.
Read more: Ungesund: Yellow Fever, the Antebellum Gulf South, and German Immigration