In Jim Downs Sick from
Freedom, he begins his explanation of widespread epidemics and mass death
tolls that resulted in freedpeople after emancipation by first, the treatment
of free blacks and slaves during the Civil War and later, showing how this treatment followed post-emancipation. Using a man named Joseph Miller
and his family as an example of the horrendous conditions black families had
been left to survive in, Downs illustrates the beginning of the negligent
treatment of the black community in America, even those who were serving their
country. Like so many other black families during the war, “The Miller family
had neither a place to live nor a reliable source of food” because even though “the
Emancipation Proclamation officially freed the slaves… it contained no
provisions for how they would survive in the midst of the war.”[1]
This example allows a clear understanding of the main argument of the entire
book: freedom meant that freedpeople were left to fend for themselves, with
little support from the federal legislation in place, causing health issues to spread like wildfire.
After the
war, once emancipation had officially set in, migration of freed people to the
North exposed them to a new environment, and because of their “status” most
were stuck in densely populated, and unsanitary living conditions. This, in
turn, caused the widespread infection of the smallpox virus, which eventually
became an epidemic. Several factors allowed this virus to continuously infect
people including a failure by the federal government to act by funding
scientific research, an embedded belief in black inferiority, and a historic
maltreatment of black people seeking medical treatment.[2]
In fact, the Medical Society reported that since this epidemic was only
infecting freedpeople, that eventually they would become extinct, and therefore
it was not worth the research.[3]
This sort of negligent mindset fathered the current social climate relating to
healthcare for minorities that has historically disadvantaged the well-being of
people of color.
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