In 1902, Dr. Charles Stiles identified hookworm, an intestinal parasite, as the cause of the lethargy that had come to stereotype poor white Southerners. Stiles coined the scientific term for the parasite Necator americanus, meaning “the American Murderer,” which is a bit of a misnomer since it rarely was the direct cause of death.[2] Hookworm became more popularly known as “the germ of laziness” due to symptoms of anemia, thin blood, and being “addicted to the habit of eating dirt.”[3] Exposure to hookworm was most common through contact with human feces, often occurring while walking outdoors barefoot or while using unsanitary outhouses. Hookworm was so widespread across the southern region of the U.S. that it infected as much as 40 percent of the white population.[4]
A 1909 McClure’s Magazine article, “The Vampire of the South,” claimed, “there are today two millions of these poor whites – our native born whites – suffering with anemia, and hardly one of those two million knows, or even suspects, that he is really suffering from an internal parasite.”[5] The author’s attention to the prevalence of hookworm specifically in “our native born whites” reflects the development of viewing hookworm as particularly a problem for poor white communities, a view bolstered by white physicians and philanthropists.
However, investigations regarding the prevalence of hookworm in Black communities were neglected by physicians. White physicians like Stiles knew that hookworm also impacted Black communities, but deliberately chose to focus their eradication efforts on white populations. These physicians believed that “although their ancestors brought hookworms to North America, Southern Blacks proved less susceptible to hookworm,” mainly due to generational exposure to the hookworm in Africa.[6] Southern doctors used this rhetoric as reasoning to exclude Black communities from eradication efforts.
In fact, some white people blamed Black Americans for the prevalence of the parasite itself. As a 1928 article in the Black newspaper The Chicago Defender noted, white officials like Navy Rear-Admiral E.R. Stitt were quick to blame Black people for hookworm, when he stated that “there was no doubt that Africans introduced hookworm” to the United States.[7] Not only did white writers blame Black people for spreading these diseases, but they believed that white people suffered more from the illnesses. Even when white physicians did spread public health education to the Black community, it was self-interestedly and paternalistically aimed at protecting whites.