Essay On The Antebellum Era

1277 Words6 Pages

Death has always plagued humanity. Humans in the past have rebbuttled sickness with medicine. Humans and medicine have evolved alongside one another while disease continued to manifest rampantly. Some escalated to a severity that left individuals with less than a forty percent chance to live past the age of thirty. Unfortunately, this was the harsh reality for countless individuals during the Antebellum Louisiana era because the medical resources medical professionals had during late 1800s were vastly different in comparison to the resources available in today’s society. . Detrimental epidemics, such as the excruciating Yellow Fever, Malaria, and Smallpox outbreaks, resulted in the devastation of numerous populations. Aside from the elderly …show more content…

In deeper analysis, Malaria, Yellow Fever, and Smallpox have occurred for over 4,000 years and is known for greatly impacting humans and their history during the Antebellum era. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention highlighted in the beginning of the article, “Malaria became widely recognized in Greece by the 4th century BCE, and it was responsible for the decline of many of the city-state populations”. Since our medical resources weren’t available to individuals during the Antebellum era, they were able to infer when a person contracted malaria by analyzing their blood. They could also tell when individuals caught this said disease because they would show symptoms of fevers every third day, and the releasing of merozoites in our bloodstreams. Towards the end of the Yellow Fever epidemic, over 5000 individuals were dead. Writers from the History webpage claim, “Famous early American Cotton Mather described it as ‘turning yellow then vomiting and bleeding every way.” The only way individuals during the Antebellum era knew that people had been infected was by their symptom, and based upon the symptoms they would experiment until they found a cure. Lastly, Smallpox during the 1990’s was used as a defense mechanism in the