Abstract
THIS point, interesting to anthropologists, is raised anew by a writer on the history of epidemics (NATURE, June 16), who asks whether the alleged protection is supported by all recent authorities. Recent authorities are not so well placed for judging of this matter as the earlier; for the reason that immunity is not alleged except for the African negro of pure blood or unchanged racial characters, and that these conditions of the problem have been much less frequently satisfied in the yellow-fever harbours of the western hemisphere since the African slave trade ceased. However, there was a good opportunity in 1866, during the disastrous yellow fever among the French troops of the Mexican expedition when they lay at Vera Cruz. Among them was a regiment of Nubians, who had been enlisted for the expedition by permission of the Khedive: that regiment had not a single case of yellow fever all through the epidemic. The African negro regiment brought over from the French colonies of Martinique and Guadeloupe had two or three cases, with, I think, one death. The rest of the troops, including Frenchmen, Arabs from Algeria, native Mexicans and Creoles, had no immunity whatever, but, on the other hand, a most disastrous fatality. The medical officers of the French service have recorded the facts principally in the Archives de Médecine Navale, their conclusion as to racial immunity being the same that has passed current among the earlier authorities as a truth of high general value (admitting, of course, of exceptions in special circumstances), and a truth that has never, so far as I know, been formally controverted by anyone, although other points concerning yellow fever have been the subject of as obstinate controversy as those touching small-pox itself. The experiences of the French at Gorée, a town with ten times as many negroes as whites, exactly confirmed those of Vera Cruz in the same year (Arch, de Méd. nav., ix. 343).
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CREIGHTON, C. Immunity of the African Negro from Yellow Fever. Nature 46, 200 (1892). https://doi.org/10.1038/046200a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/046200a0
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