Pulling the Teeth of the Tropics: Environment, Disease, Race, and the U.S. Sanitary Program in Panama, 1904-14

FAIN: FT-54811-07

Paul Shriver Sutter
Regents of the University of Colorado, Boulder (Athens, GA 30602-0001)

“Pulling the Teeth of the Tropics” will be an environmental and public health history of the American era of canal construction in Panama. It will examine American perceptions of the tropics and who was naturally suited to live and labor there, how those perceptions informed U.S. sanitary and other administrative practices, and how those practices resulted in the creation of a Canal Zone landscape riddled with racial and medical inequities. It will also argue that the environmental changes wrought by canal construction created many of the conditions conducive to tropical diseases such as malaria and yellow fever. Americans passed off as natural what were often epidemiological conditions of their own creation.