Fever 1793

Use this activity to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity. 

ACTIVITY: “Visions of Epidemics”

Writers are not the only artists who use their work to try to grapple with epidemics; visual artists, too, use their work to ask questions and convey ideas about the problem of epidemic disease.

Fever 1793 takes place in the late 1700s—but this was far from the only serious outbreak of yellow fever the world has faced. In the late 1800s, waves of this disease swept through several countries around the world. Use the links provided to look at two pieces of art that came out of yellow fever epidemics in the late 1800s.

•  Oil painting by Juan Manuel Blanes: Yellow Fever in Buenos Aires, 1871
• Sketch by unknown artist: Yellow Fever Burial, 1878

This activity has two parts; complete Part A before you start work on Part B.

Part A

Create a word cloud about each piece of art.

• Look carefully at the piece of art:
• What is happening in this picture?
• What does the artist seem to want to emphasize?
• What feelings and ideas are conveyed by the expressions on people’s faces, their body language, and their positions in the frame?
• What feelings and ideas are conveyed by things like color, lines, light, perspective, and so on?
• Choose an online word cloud generator that allows you to input text manually, choose fonts, and weight words.