The first paper revisits Kathryn Olivarius’s influential concept of immunocapital, arguing that while immunity to yellow fever could bolster economic opportunity among white men in New Orleans, its material effects have been overstated. By situating immunocapital at the nexus of social and symbolic capital, and by examining immigrant experiences from 1790 to 1840, the paper concludes that yellow fever held greater symbolic than structural power in determining social mobility, which remained anchored in traditional networks of family, culture, and language.

The second paper analyzes slaveholders’ responses to yellow fever and cholera epidemics between 1793 and 1858. Using court records, it shows how disease destabilized assumptions about enslaved people’s health and value. As cholera undermined long‑held beliefs that African Americans were naturally immune to epidemic disease, slaveholders paradoxically increased enslaved people’s exposure to urban epidemiological risk, thereby defending slavery by expanding pro-slavery networks and reinforcing the economic centrality of cotton.

The third paper shifts the focus to the intellectual milieu of Octavia Walton Le Vert’s Mobile salon during the 1840s and 1850s. It highlights how elite Southerners—writers, physicians, politicians, and scientists—championed public health measures and emerging epidemiological ideas while simultaneously endorsing racial hierarchy and slavery. This Whiggish conservative circle exemplifies how scientific modernity and racialized social order coexisted, revealing the complexity of Southern intellectual life during an age of medical innovation and political entrenchment.

This fourth paper examines the intersections of health, capital, gender, and power through the life of an African-born Muslim woman enslaved in South Carolina during the Revolutionary era to the eve of the Civil War. Drawing on military labor records, medical accounts, and local archives, it analyzes how enslaved women’s bodies functioned simultaneously as sites of economic extraction and medical scrutiny. Forced into military and infrastructural labor, this woman was later described in medical literature as physically exceptional and long-lived. Such representations reveal how slaveholding regimes interpreted Black women’s health as both economic asset and racialized spectacle.

Together, these papers illuminate the multifaceted entanglements between slavery, health, and epidemiology—showing how disease shaped economic strategies, racial ideologies, and elite cultural politics across the slaveholding South. The panel advances new ways of understanding health as a site of power and contestation in a slave society grappling with both scientific change and social instability.

This session is structured as a formal panel featuring four research papers from scholars at different stages of their career and an experienced chair, followed by a moderated discussion designed to encourage comparative analysis and audience engagement. The session will appeal broadly to historians of slavery, medicine, capitalism, and the nineteenth‑century United States, as well as scholars interested in the intersections of public health, gender, racial ideology, and state formation.