Printing Parasites: Hookworm and Public Health Narratives in Southern Fiction

Abstract

During the early twentieth century, public health campaigns taught Americans from all strata of society to recognize that a great threat to the health and prosperity of the South was not an enemy abroad, but rather a bloodsucking parasite living underfoot in Southern soil: hookworm. According to the information widely disseminated by these campaigns, hookworm infection was responsible for the physical "backwardness" of Southern men, women, and children. By linking physical and cognitive symptoms to a parasitic source, the public health campaign introduced a new literary tool for constructing characters who are not "quite right" that continues to be employed in contemporary fiction. This paper focuses on the so-called "lazy man's disease" (hookworm) and takes the work of William Faulkner as a case study to demonstrate how authors deployed a figurative form of hookworm to construct disabled, poor, and degenerate characters.

Integrating Community Ecology Into the Study of Parasites: Exploring the Effect of Host Behavior on Parasite Transmission Rates

“…While this narrative conveys real historical events and biology, the commonly used structure of the story tacitly reinforces harmful stereotypes about the populations that were affected. It also ignores important historical context where public messaging around this biological discovery was used to support and spread racist and classist ideologies in public health and popular culture (23). Teaching such material can be made more inclusive by integrating an explicit discussion of the social context in which the scientific discoveries were made, and the role scientific information and subsequent interpretation play in constructing both public policy and public narratives (see 21,22).…”