The third decade of the twenty-first century has started with the 'worst years ever', right? For billions of people around the planet, our 'new normals' are unpleasant, uncomfortable and dangerous, made so by the pervasive effects of COVID-19. However, history tells us that our assumptions about what was normal - an absence of infectious disease - were aberrations; for thousands of years our ancestors regularly had their lives and social orders upended by an array of infections. In this first series of Body Politics, we examine this history, particularly by way of the politics that have emerged in parallel with and because of infectious diseases over the past two centuries or so. Episode 1 takes us to the United States and its experience of a deadly tropical disease, carried by mosquitos, called yellow fever. Although closer to our own times, this was a disease associated with America symbolising the spread of democracy around the world, not much further back in time, yellow fever was intertwined with the upholding of a brutal and pervasive slave economy, especially in the American Deep South. In conversation with Stanford University's Dr Kathryn Olivarius, this episode traces the twin histories of slavery and yellow fever through the city of New Orleans, also known as the city where blues music was born, which in and of itself was originally an expression of the anguish that slavery caused amongst African Americans. 

Ver todos los episodios