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New Orleans rejects quarantines time and time again.

There are only four quarantines installed and only very briefly in the antebellum period in New Orleans.

That's very different from other cities and that's pretty extraordinary.

And so you have these doctors here who are politically

powerful, and they're embracing, you know, they continue to embrace the increasingly sort of,

I would, most, most doctors in America and in Europe were very, were increasingly skeptical

of this notion that yellow fever was myasmatic. They said basically they embraced anti-contentionism. They said that yellow fever

was not spread through human-to-human contact. Therefore, quarantines were useless. And other cities

showed that actually quarantines did work to stem yellow fever, even if it wasn't sort of contagious

in the traditional sense of spreading between human, you know,

through human to human contact. You know, other cities used quarantine to great effect, but you have

this sort of this political class in New Orleans saying, you know, it doesn't really matter

if quarantine worked in Genoa or in London or in Paris or in Boston, you know, have a quarantine

worked there that has no bearing on how it would work in New Orleans because we're just different and we're special. And, you know, so any kind of like public health intervention that works elsewhere, like, you know, pish-posh, that just won't work here. And you have this, this is completely ingrained into the sort of political culture of this place. Again, it's not just apathy.

It's like active, it's an active repulsion to this.

And so this chapter five was actually sort of perhaps it was my favorite chapter to write of the book.

This was about disease denialism.

And it was my favorite to write.

And I started writing this before COVID, but I felt like I had, I felt like I had sort of like had this, like, weird, like, map of how this, the discourse was going to go around COVID because of this, which is that you have, you know, you have, so the poet, the sort of culture in New Orleans becomes to essentially deny that yellow people is a problem. Yeah. So, so they'll say, you know, you'll have people who just the, just the year before, they're writing home, you know, they're writing home to their moms in Connecticut saying, I'm so scared of yellow paper. You know, I, you know, I don't know what to do. Should I leave? Or should I maybe, should I eat my friends black vomit so I should get sick.

What should I do?

What should I do?

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