Convenient Frailty: Medical Contestations of Asthma and Hay Fever in African Americans in Late Nineteenth-Century America

• Published in: Journal of the history of medicine and allied sciences 2024-04, Vol.79 (2), p.115-128
• Main Author: Kola, Ijeoma B
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Asthma - complications; Asthma - diagnosis; Black or African American; Frailty - complications; Humans; Male; Physicians; Rhinitis, Allergic, Seasonal - complications; United States
• ISSN: 0022-5045; 1468-4373
• DOI: 10.1093/jhmas/jrad045

Post-Emancipation medical and social science scholars extensively theorized Black susceptibility to illness, disease, and death. Most studies of late nineteenth-century medical ideas about the relationship between race and disease have highlighted the construction of medical beliefs that associated Black physical weakness with a proclivity to ill health. This study presents an alternate narrative, one where certain diseases - asthma and hay fever - reflected an opposing racialized understanding of disease that instead centered on White frailty. Based on an examination of turn-of-the-century asthma and hay fever medical literature produced by George Miller Beard, the professionalization of the United States Hay Fever Association, and the publication and dismissal of the first recorded case of asthma in an African American man in 1884, this article argues that late nineteenth-century asthma and hay fever physicians, who themselves often suffered from the conditions, defined the typical asthma patient along racial lines to protect the exclusivity of their own professional and social identities. As a result, asthma and hay fever in Black communities, particularly in the North, where asthma and hay fever scholars primarily lived and worked, remained obscured and untreated until the mid-twentieth century.