Imagining Southern bodies: A review of 'Sex, Sickness and Slavery'

Some Southern physicians twisted medical science to aid the proslavery argument, writes historian Peter McCandless in the journal Southern Spaces, a digital initiative of Emory University Libraries.

McCandless' article is a review of "Sex, Sickness and Slavery: Illness in the Antebellum South," by Marli F. Weiner with Mazie Hough. Below is an excerpt:

"A Gullah proverb warns, 'every sick ain't fa tell de doctor' (don't tell the doctor all your ailments). After reading 'Sex, Sickness, and Slavery,' the wisdom of that saying seems more obvious, especially as it applies to women and blacks in the antebellum South. The late Marli Weiner, a professor of history at the University of Maine, demonstrates convincingly how antebellum southern physicians—white males all—used information about their patients to advance their own professional and sectional political agendas. They actively used medical science to justify racial and sexual hierarchies, to define and characterize bodies by sex, race, and place, and to enhance their authority as physicians and white men. In the process, they wrestled with the problem of what Weiner calls 'ambiguous bodies' (mixed race, sexual hybrids, and 'monstrosities') and with the complex relationships between minds and bodies. ...

"They debated what aspects made blacks medically suitable for slavery, but southern physicians accepted the assumption that slavery benefited blacks, and some actively sought to provide medical evidence for it. Southern physicians had no difficulty justifying black subjugation.

"Justifying the domination of women should have been even easier. European and northern academics and physicians had already provided plenty of arguments and evidence. Nevertheless, as 'Sex, Sickness, and Slavery' shows, southern physicians faced a unique problem: How could they reconcile arguments for sexual and racial subordination in a way that did not undermine either? They had to categorize people by both race and gender, and in ways that supported male gender and white racial superiority. Few physicians doubted white or male supremacy, but a coherent racial ideology required that white women be shown to be superior to black men. Moreover, if women were indeed the weaker and sicklier sex, demanding protection and gentle care, how could one justify making black women perform hard physical work alongside black men, even when close to giving birth and shortly after delivering?"

Read the whole review in Southern Spaces.

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Human mobility data may help curb urban epidemics

By Carol Clark

Residents of cities like New York and London tend to move about in fairly predictable routines, following the same routes between their jobs and schools each day. When it comes to a city in the developing world, however, human movement is much more varied, a finding with important implications for controlling an infectious disease pandemic.

The Public Library of Science (PL0S One) published the first major analysis of daily human mobility in a resource-poor city, led by scientists at Emory University’s Department of Environmental Studies.

The researchers used GPS technology to quantify the movement and contact dynamics of nearly 600 residents of Iquitos, Peru. They applied the data to create a computer simulation for predicting the transmission rate of a flu virus.

“We found that the irregular movement of people in Iquitos increases the probability of flu transmission by 20 percent, compared to cities in developed nations,” says lead author Gonzalo Vazquez-Prokopec, an Emory disease ecologist.

The study authors are making their data estimates and simulation methods publicly available, so that other researchers can conduct further experiments and build on their work.

“It is estimated that more than 90 percent of the mortality from a potential influenza pandemic would occur in developing countries, where vaccine and antiviral stockpiles are minimal,” the study authors write. “The lack of detailed models to estimate infectious disease transmission dynamics in such settings limits the ability to enforce containment measures or plan emergency preparedness strategies.”

Rather than commuting to a single workplace, poorer residents of Iquitos often work several jobs, such as driving a three-wheeled mototaxi, or selling produce at multiple markets. Photo via Wikipedia Commons.

Most previous data on human mobility, drawn from cities in North America and Europe, shows that urbanites visit an average of two to four locations daily.

In Iquitos, human movement is much more fluid.

Full-time jobs are scarce for the population of 400,000 living along the left bank of the Amazon River, on the edge of the Peruvian rainforest. “Most people are self-employed or have several jobs to try and make ends meet,” Vazquez-Prokopec says. Common occupations of poorer residents include driving makeshift taxis or selling produce at one of the multiple open markets in the city.

Some previous studies in other parts of the world have looked at cell phone data to track and model human movements. The data is limited, however, due to issues of antenna density, restricted information from cell-phone carriers and the fact that some people do not have cell phones.

For the Iquitos study the researchers outfitted 582 residents with an i-GotU GPS device, which is ordinarily used as a photo-tagging tool for hikers. The i-GotU was selected for the study because it is small (about the size of a thumb drive), waterproof, relatively affordable, has a large memory and long battery life, and is password protected.

Each study participant wore one of the devices like a necklace as they went about their daily routines during a two-week period. The devices were programmed to capture location data every 2.5 minutes, from 5 am until midnight.

About 70 percent of the world's 3.3 billion city dwellers live in resource-poor environments. Aerial view of Iquitos by Viault / Wikipedia Commons.

The study yielded more than 2 million raw GPS positions, with an error margin of just four meters, tagged with date and time. The researchers used a data-reduction algorithm to calculate the average number of locations visited each day for the study participants as a whole, and by age groups, ranging from 7 years old to 60.

The results show that the participants visited an average of six locations per day overall. People in the peak working age group of 36 to 45 visited an average of nine locations daily.

“The more random your movements are, the more chances you have to pass a pathogen like the flu,” Vazquez-Prokopec says, explaining the 20 percent higher transmission risk, compared to a developed city.

While the Iquitos study represents just one city in the developing world, the researchers hope that the fine-scale, spatial-temporal data they have gathered will help fill the knowledge gap on human mobility in similar cities.

About 70 percent of the world’s 3.3 billion city dwellers live in resource-poor urban environments. “Uncovering the basic mechanisms governing complex human behaviors in these environments is paramount for developing better infrastructure, fostering economic development and responding to infectious disease threats,” Vazquez-Prokopec says.

The Emory research team also included Uriel Kitron, chair of the department of Environmental Studies, and post-doctoral fellow Donal Bisanzio. The study is part of a larger, ongoing disease ecology project centered in Iquitos that also includes scientists from the University of California, Davis, the U.S. Navy, the University of Iowa, Tulane University, San Diego State and researchers in Peru.

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Turning green slime into liquid gold

What if you could replace the petroleum molecules that we use in fuel and so many other products with a substitute made from algae?

Emory alum Harrison Dillon will explain how he’s doing just that, as the guest speaker for Emory’s Biology Undergraduate Research Symposium, on Thursday, April 25 at 4 pm in WHSCAB Auditorum.

In 2003, Dillon and fellow Emory alum Jonathan Wolfson founded Solazyme, named one of the “50 Hottest Companies in Bio-energy” for 2011 to 2012 by Biofuels Digest.

During a TEDxAtlanta talk (see above video) in 2010, Dillon explained how he and Wolfson became close friends as college freshmen and dreamed of starting a company together. They parted ways for graduate school. Dillon, who loved biotechnology and genetics, was working on a PhD in human genetics, but halfway through he became disenchanted with the idea of a career in the pharmaceutical industry.

“I started reading the scientific literature about micro-organisms that make stuff that’s flammable,” Dillon recalls. “And I thought, if you could use all this genetics and biotechnology to make organisms that make stuff that burns efficiently, maybe you could make renewable fuel. I called Jonathan and I said, ‘I know what our company’s going to be: We’re going to use micro-algae to make fuel.’ And he said, ‘That’s delusional. I love it.’”

Happy Earth Day!

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A primatologist on the origins of morality

Primatologist Frans de Waal, director of Emory's Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, spoke with CNN's Kelly Murray about his new book, "The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates."

Below is an excerpt from the interview, posted on CNN's Light Years blog:

CNN’s Kelly Murray: Tell us about the title of your book.

Frans de Waal: Well, the reason I chose that title is, when I bring up the origins of morality, it revolves around God, or comes from religion, and I want to address the issue that I think morality is actually older than religion. So I’m getting into the religion question, and how important is religion for morality. I think it plays a role, but it’s a secondary role. Instead of being the source of morality, religion came later, maybe to fortify morality.

CNN: How would you say that ethics or morality is separate from religion?

De Waal: Well, I think that morality is older. In the sense that I find it very hard to believe that 100,000 or 200,000 years ago, our ancestors did not believe in right and wrong, and did not punish bad behavior, did not care about fairness. Very long ago our ancestors had moral systems. Our current institutions are only a couple of thousand years old, which is really not old in the eyes of a biologist. So I think religion came after morality. Religion may have become a codification of morality, and it may fortify it, but it’s not the origin of it.

Read the whole interview here.

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The growing buzz on animal self-medication

In addition to gathering pollen, honeybees collect plant saps to create a resinous material that reduces bacteria and parasite loads in hives. (Photo by Louise Docker/Wikipedia.)

By Carol Clark

Birds do it. Bees do it. Even forest-dwelling ants do it. Increasing evidence suggests that a wide range of animals self-medicate.

“We need to pay close attention to how animals may use plants or other materials as medicine, because it has direct implications for human health and food production,” says Emory biologist Jaap de Roode.

De Roode wrote a review of recent studies on self-medication in animals for the current issue of the journal Science. De Roode and his co-authors, Thierry Lefèvre and Mark Hunter, recently published their own study showing that monarch butterflies use toxins found in milkweed to cure themselves and their offspring of disease.

De Roode will also be giving a talk on animal self-medication on Saturday, April 20, as one of 11 speakers set for TEDxEmory.

Milkweed, left, is a pest to farmers, but medication to monarch butterflies. The insects use toxins in some species of the plant to kill parasites in their offspring. (iStockphoto.com)

Until a little more than a decade ago, de Roode notes, primates were among the only animals besides humans thought to have the capacity for self-medication. Chimpanzees, for instance, had been observed in the wild eating plants with anti-parasitic properties but with little or no nutritional value.

Then some birds were found to line their nests with plants that ward off parasites, fungi and other pathogens. Just last year, ecologists in Mexico published a study suggesting that house sparrows and finches may be studding their nests with cigarette butts because nicotine reduces mite infestations.

The evidence for self-medication is actually stronger for insects. It’s easier to conduct laboratory experiments on them, and to clearly demonstrate whether an insect’s preference for a certain food delivers a benefit to fitness and survival.

“It’s now clear that animals do not have to have a big brain or advanced cognitive skills to use medicine found in nature,” de Roode says. “We’re seeing that these behaviors can be innate.”

Emory biologist Todd Schlenke, for instance, recently found that when fruit flies sense parasitic wasps in their vicinity, they lay their eggs in an alcohol-soaked environment, forcing their larvae to consume booze as a drug to combat the deadly wasps. And the larvae themselves, given the choice, prefer to eat food high in alcohol if, and only if, they are infected with the wasp eggs. The alcohol treatment is highly effective, greatly improving the survival rate of infected larvae.

No one has researched the possibility of whether alcohol could have a similar effect on humans suffering from blood-borne parasites.

Fruit flies have evolved the capability to seek out alcohol to combat infections by parasitic wasps. (Photo by Andre Karwath/Wikipedia.)

De Roode notes that insects and other animals may hold many medicinal secrets of potential benefit to humans.

Honey bees, for example, make a sticky substance called propolis from plant resins and incorporate it into the architecture of their hives. This resinous material has been shown to reduce bacteria and parasite loads in hives. A recent study showed that bees exposed to the spores of fungal parasites increase their resin foraging rates, suggesting that making propolis may be a case of self-medication.

In the wild, honey bees line the entire interior of their hives with resin to create what is called the “propolis envelope.” Many commercial beekeepers, however, select for bees that don’t gather resinous material, because the substance gums up the manmade hive frames.

Meanwhile, honeybees in the United States are suffering from die-offs that have wiped out nearly half of the hives needed to pollinate fruits and vegetables in the country. Drought, pesticides, viruses and other pathogens have all been suggested as possible causes of the bee deaths.

Could discouraging a self-medicating trait in bees also be a contributing factor?

“Those are the kinds of questions that are important to look at and think about,” de Roode says.

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