Yellow Fever and Institutional Development: The Rise and Fall of the National Board of Health

Thomas R. Gray and Jeffery A. Jenkins

Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy, 2021, vol. 2, issue 1, 143-167

Abstract: We examine the rise and fall of the National Board of Health (NBH), which was a federal institution created in response to the yellow fever epidemic of 1878 to direct national disease policy. Historical accounts suggest a number of reasons why the NBH was not reauthorized in 1883, four years after it was created and granted significant quarantine authority. We examine these arguments through an analysis of roll-call voting in Congress. We find that the creation and empowerment of the NBH in 1879 is best seen as an emergency action. Republican members of Congress — and conservative members outside the South, more generally — were willing to put the country's interests ahead of their own for a time. But as relatively epidemic-free years followed, Republicans and more conservative members of Congress — conditional on the recency of their state being affected by yellow fever — were largely unwilling to maintain a federal entity with power to significantly affect commercial activity.

Keywords: Yellow fever; National Board of Health; roll-call votes; Congress (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/112.00000033 (application/xml)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:now:jnlpip:113.00000033

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy from now publishers
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lucy Wiseman ().