Yellow Fever and Sanitary Policies in the Nineteenth-Century Portuguese Empire: Lisbon and Luanda, 1856–1860

Abstract

Yellow fever became a recurrent threat to public health across
the Atlantic during the nineteenth century, long before its aetiology and transmission were scientifically clarified through the work of Carlos Finlay and Walter Reed. Within the Portuguese imperial context, two outbreaks were particularly significant: Lisbon (1856–1858), which gave rise to the Relatório da Epidemia de Febre Amarella em Lisboa no anno de 1857, later praised by Ricardo Jorge as a model of hygienist mobilisation; and Luanda (1860), which led to the publication of the Relatórios sobre a epidemia de febre amarella em Loanda

no anno de 1860, underscoring the strategic importance of disease control in colonial settings and its articulation with metropolitan health authorities. This study centres on these official reports, read alongside previously underused documentation from the Maritime Health archives preserved at the Museum of Health in Lisbon (reports, correspondence, records from the Casa de Saúde de Belém and the Lisbon Lazaretto, and sanitary inspections of vessels). In Lisbon, a predominantly contagionist paradigm underpinned isolation, hospital expansion, sanitary statistics, autopsies, cartographic mapping and intensified maritime surveillance, in dialogue with European hygienism and the International Sanitary Conferences. In Luanda, physicians favoured an anti-contagionist, miasmatic reading, attributing the outbreak

to local environmental conditions and poor acclimatisation among newly arrived Europeans; containment prioritised municipal hygiene and policing— cleansing miasma-producing sites (notably refuse-laden beaches) and managing insalubrious areas rather than systematic isolation of people. By comparing these paradigms and their institutional settings, the article highlights the centrality of ports, quarantine and isolation measures in nineteenth-century epidemic management, and situates Portugal’s response within the broader circuits of international sanitary governance.