ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that American physicians, political leaders, naturalists, and rural press editors responded to yellow fever's return to the United States by identifying the distribution of water on the earth's surface as the primary barometer of healthy climates. Stretching from the Atlantic seaboard's coastal salt marshes to the Mississippi River's alluvial floodplains, the United States was home to 'vast factories of this febrile poison'. In response to Buffon's grave accusations, Americans framed 'climate' as an infinitely malleable phenomenon whose epidemiological qualities diminished as the scale and scope of landscape modifications increased. In 1793, a fresh outbreak of yellow fever in several cities prompted a bitter medical debate about the disease's etiological origins and the extent of climactic improvement. Yet irrigation and drainage were always flip sides of the same coin, and scholars would do well to revisit the rich and fertile discourse surrounding anthropogenic climate change and drainage in early America.
