|  Margaret Humphreys, the Josiah Charles
Trent Professor in the History of Medicine and an associate clinical
professor of medicine at Duke University, will speak on “The
South’s Secret Weapons: Disease, Environment and the Civil
War” at 7 p.m. Wednesday, April 2, in Giffels Auditorium
at the University of Arkansas.
“Confederate leaders believed that their region’s most dreaded
diseases, malaria and yellow fever, would stop Union forces from invading and
conquering the South,” said Elliott West, distinguished professor in
history in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University
of Arkansas. “Professor Humphreys will discuss those diseases’ actual
impact on the war and how both sides dealt with them.”
Her major interest is the history of disease in America, especially
in the South. Until the last half of the 20th century, diseases
such as malaria, yellow fever, pellagra, and hookworm marked the
South as tropical, impoverished, and strikingly different from
the rest of the United States.
Humphreys has received research support from the American Council
of Learned Societies, the National Library of Medicine, the Burroughs-Wellcome
History of Medicine Fund and the Trent Foundation. She is a recipient
of the Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship at the National Humanities
Center, American Council of Learned Societies.
|
