Special Collections Exhibition Lagniappe: Public Pathogens: Louisiana's Historical Struggle With Disease

LSU Libraries Special Collections presents “Public Pathogens: Louisiana’s Historical Struggle With Disease” in Hill Memorial Library from September 29, 2025, to December 12, 2025. The exhibition examines Louisiana’s past battles with disease and  the human stories that accompanied them. 
LSU Special Collections holds historical materials from early statehood to the present that illuminate private and public responses to a wide variety of dangerous diseases, including yellow fever, cholera, typhoid, influenza, HIV-AIDS, and COVID-19. Yellow fever, particularly as experienced in New Orleans, is most heavily represented in the collection, but a variety of illnesses wreaked havoc simultaneously during times of war, political change, and natural disaster. 
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Louisiana Medical Society oral history interview abstracts

• Interviews available online

Arthur Elihu Pitchenik oral history interview abstract

These interviews belong to the University History series and the Distinguished Faculty and Administrators subseries. Dr. Pitchenik recalls the various positions he held throughout his career, including his work as a physician on the cruise ship U.S.S. Constitution, the Brooklyn Board of Health tuberculosis clinic, the Los Angeles based group practice Kaiser Permanente, LSU School of Medicine at Lafayette Charity Hospital, as well as University of Miami at Jackson Memorial Hospital and the Veteran Affairs Healthcare System.  He served as a consultant on tuberculosis and AIDS for the World Health Organization, National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Florida Department of Health and the South African Department of Health.

Blum, Edward J. “The Crucible of Disease: Trauma, Memory, and National Reconciliation during the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878.” The Journal of Southern History 69, no. 4 (2003): 791–820. 

Carrigan, Jo Ann. The Saffron Scourge: A History of Yellow Fever in Louisiana, 1796-1905. Lafayette, LA.: University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, 2015.

Duffy, John, ed. The Rudolph Matas History of Medicine in Louisiana, Volume 1. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1958.

Duffy, John, ed. The Rudolph Matas History of Medicine in Louisiana, Volume 2. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1962.

Duffy, John. Sword of Pestilence: The New Orleans Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1853. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966.

East, II, Dennis. “Health and Wealth: Goals of the New Orleans Public Health Movement, 1879-84.” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 9, no. 3 (1968): 245–75. 

Ellis, John H. “Businessmen and Public Health in the Urban South During the Nineteenth Century: New Orleans, Memphis, and Atlanta. (Concluded).” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 44, no. 4 (1970): 346–71. 

Ellis, John H. Yellow Fever and Public Health in the New South. 1st ed. University Press of Kentucky, 1992. 

Gillson, Gordon. “Louisiana: Pioneer in Public Health.” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 4, no. 3 (1963): 207–32. 

Hildreth, Flora Bassett. The Howard Association of New Orleans, 1837-1878.  Dissertation submitted to University of California, Los Angeles Department of History, 1975.

Huffard, R. Scott. “Infected Rails: Yellow Fever and Southern Railroads.” The Journal of Southern History 79, no. 1 (2013): 79–112. 

Kramer, Howard D. “Agitation for Public Health Reform in the 1870’s: Part II The National Board of Health of 1879.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 4, no. 1 (1949): 75–89. 

McGinty, G. W. “The Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878.” The Southwestern Social Science Quarterly 21, no. 3 (1940): 227–33. 

McKiven, Henry M. Jr. “The Political Construction of a Natural Disaster: The Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1853.” The Journal of American History 94, no. 3 (2007): 734–42. 

Olivarius, Kathryn. Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2022.

Sigerist, Henry E. “The Cost of Illness to the City of New Orleans in 1850.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 15, no. 5 (1944): 498–507. 

Waisley, Thomas. “Public Health Programs in Early Twentieth-Century Louisiana.” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 41, no. 1 (2000): 41–69. 

Warner, Margaret. “Local Control versus National Interest: The Debate over Southern Public Health, 1878-1884.” The Journal of Southern History 50, no. 3 (1984): 407–28. 

Willoughby, Urmi Engineer. Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2017.