SECTOR AGROPECUARIO OBJETIVO

Charles W. Stiles, born in New York, studied medical zoology in Paris, Berlin, Leipzig and Trieste in the 1880s, investigating a hookworm that caused anemia among miners in

Switzerland and Italy.233 _{In 1902, Dr. Stiles presented his findings to the Pan-American Sanitary}

Conference in Washington, D.C. He reported that Nector americanus had long been endemic to the U.S. South, a “laziness germ” that was responsible, he declared, for “the pitiable condition of the poor white in many southern states,” and “inferior physical development and proverbial laziness of the ‘cracker.’”234

232_{- Steven Palmer, From Popular Medicine to Medical Populism: Doctors, Healers and Public Power in Costa}

Rica, 1800-1940 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003)

233_{-Charles Wardell Styles, The Old World Hookworm, Uncinaria duodenalis (Railliet, 1885) in C.W. Styles, The}

Significance of Recent American Cases of Hookworm Disease (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1902), 192-194 University of Chicago Library Dig. Oct. 18, 2010

234_{-“Is Laziness Due to a Germ: The Discovery of Dr. Stiles of the Public Health Service Described Before the}

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Stiles’ claims were met with ridicule and defensive anger. Methodist Bishop Warren Candler of Georgia, brother of Coca-Cola’s Asa Candler, denounced the theory as “calculated to create further prejudice against the States and people of the South,” urging Southerners to resist a “million-dollar dose of vermifuge.” Decrying an insult to white Southern manhood, the Macon

Telegraph demanded, “Where was that hookworm or ‘laziness’ disease when it took five Yankee

soldiers to whip one Southerner?”235 _{Outside the South, observers were more open to Stiles’}

findings. A 1909 article in McClure’s magazine, tellingly titled, “Vampire of the South,” described the controversy this way, “the joke buzzed on-the ‘lazy bug, the lazy germ’: people laughed whenever he talked about it. But Dr. Stiles had seen emaciated men trying to wrest a living from half-tilled fields, and women, whose rest never came, trying to nurse starveling babes at withered breasts; and at last, in an address, the words were wrung from the man’s heart: ‘It isn’t a thing to laugh at when women and children are dying.’”236 _{Most disturbing to readers,}

given widespread assumptions of white supremacy, was the fact that “the ‘poor whites,’ shiftless, ignorant, poverty-pinched, and wretched, are of pure Anglo-Saxon stock-as purely Anglo-Saxon as any in the country.”237 _{The “relative immunity of the negro race” to Necator americanus,}

which had been found in West Africa, was taken as evidence that African slaves originally brought the disease, thereby exacting an “import tax” paid in “pure Anglo-Saxon blood.”238

Investigating the sources of Black immunity, Dr. Charles Stiles white supremacist assumptions did not preventing him from considered the efficacy of Afro-American folk remedies-the habit of

235_{-“A Million Dollar Insult to the South, The Literary Digest November 20, 1909 Vol. 39 892 Pennsylvania State}

University Dig. Sept. 17, 2013

236_{-Marion Hamilton Carter, The Vampire of the South, McClure’s Magazine (S.S. McClure, 1909), 621} 237_{-Marion Carter, The Vampire of the South, 617}

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“dirt-eating” and a “worm tea” that “negro women very frequently give their children,” to expel roundworms, which also expelled hookworm.239

A 1908 lecture by Dr. Stiles to the North Carolina Board of Health on “The Medical Influence of the Negro in Connection with Anemia in the White” provided a medical justification for racial segregation and perceptions of Black laziness. The “two great anemia-producing

diseases of the South,” hookworm and malaria, “which are so severe on the white are relatively less severe on the negro race,” proof “that the negro race forms the great reservoir for the supply of these infections.”240 _{He took a more measured tone before Black delegates at the Hampton}

Negro Conference in Virginia, but remained adamant that poor Blacks posed the most serious thread as carriers of hookworm. He insisted “the Negro, when compared to the white, presents a

relative immunity to the direct effects of hookworm infection,” but Blacks suffered hookworm,

the debilitating effects contributing to higher death rates from tuberculosis. Listing the signs of infection, “anemia, which is often mistaken for malaria,” dry skin and hair, ulcers, the practice of dirt-eating, and “an indisposition to work,” he asked if “the laziness charged to the Negroes today is not in reality due to this disease.241

Stiles’ speculations on racial immunity extended to malaria. At New York’s Metropolitan Club in 1907, speaking before investors in Mississippi and Louisiana cotton plantations, he lectured on Black immunity to malaria. “An attack of malaria which would put you in the grave would put a negro in his bed; an attack which would put you in bed would put a negro in the cotton field rather happy. You would go under medical treatment; the negro would not. You

239_{-Charles W. Stiles, Report on the Prevalence and Geographic Distribution of Hookworm Disease (uncariasis on}

Anchystolomiasis) in the United States (Washington, D.C.: G.P.O., 1903), 52

240_{-Charles W. Stiles, Medical Influence of the Negro in Connection with Anemia in the White, Twelfth Annual}

Bulletin of the North Carolina Board of Health June 1908, 27

241_{-Charles W. Stiles, Hookworm Disease and Its Relation to the Negro” The Hampton Leaflets, Vol. 5 No. 9}

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would protect your family by screening your house against mosquitoes; the negro would not. The result is that the negro forms the greatest reservoir of malarial fever in the South”242

Malariologists took a more skeptical view towards theories of racial immunity. Dr. William Deadrick of Arkansas, the leading Southern physician in the study of malaria, rejected ideas that the Black race enjoyed absolute immunity, recognizing that Blacks had relative

immunity “that increases generally as we go southward towards the equator. Thus the negroes of the Southern States display less immunity than the negroes of the West Indies or of tropic

Africa.”243 _{Deadrick related the public health threat posed by Blacks to larger issues of}

immorality of “the negro population of the South, in whom syphilis, abuse of alcohol and tobacco, pneumonia and other etiologic factors are very prevalent.”244 _{While studies of malaria}

debated the extent of racial immunity, the disease was linked both with the alleged inferiority of Blacks labor and the debilitating effects of cotton monoculture, themes that would be

increasingly emphasized in the propaganda of the U.S. Public Health Service. A 1923 cartoon depicted a white southern farmer carrying a heavy bale of cotton, on top of which a sickly, caricatured Black laborer snoozes, bitten by a giant anopheles mosquito. (Figure 3.18)

The effects of malaria were linked with the destructive boll weevil (anthomus grandis), an insect that feeds on cotton buds, which crossed the Rio Grande in 1892. To combat the boll weevil, of Central American origin, the Bureau of Plant Industry sent Dr. O.M. Cook to

Guatemala, studying a weevil-eating kelep, the Guatemalan ant, used by Q’eqchi’ Mayan Indians of Cobán to protect cotton plants.245 _{Cook brought four thousand ants to a field station in}

242_{-The New York Farmers: Proceedings (Globe Stationary and Printing Co., 1907), 57-58} 243_{- William Heiskill Deadrick, A Practical Study of Malaria (W.B. Sanders & Co., 1909), 50} 244_{-Willian Deadrick, A Practical Study of Malaria, 232}

245_{-Orator Fuller Cook, Weevil Resistant Adaptions of the Cotton Plant (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1906)}

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Victoria, Texas, which devoured weevils. The boll weevil spread into the humid bottomlands of the Mississippi River by 1906-07, breeding grounds for weevils and kn mosquitoes. A study of Louisiana cotton plantations concluded, “portions of the loss through injury by the boll weevil must be debited to malaria,” resulting in loss of seven weeks labor, giving “the weevil an advantage over the plant.”246 _{As public health campaigns sought solutions to malaria and}

hookworm, medical studies strengthened perceptions of laziness and backwardness of Southerners, both white and Black.