This riveting story of the typhus and cholera epidemics that swept through New York City in 1892 has been updated with a new preface that tackles the COVID-19 pandemic.
Winner, 2003 Arthur J. Viseltear Prize for Outstanding Book in the History of Public Health, American Public Health Association
In Quarantine! Howard Markel traces the course of the typhus and cholera epidemics that swept through New York City in 1892. The story is told from the point of view of those involved—the public health doctors who diagnosed and treated the victims, the newspaper reporters who covered the stories, the government officials who established and enforced policy, and, most importantly, the immigrants themselves.
Drawing on rarely cited stories from the Yiddish American press, immigrant diaries and letters, and official accounts, Markel follows the immigrants on their journey from a squalid and precarious existence in Russia's Pale of Settlement, to their passage in steerage, to New York's Lower East Side, to the city's quarantine islands.
This updated edition features a new preface from the author that reflects on the themes of the book in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. At a time of renewed anti-immigrant sentiment and newly emerging infectious diseases, Quarantine! provides a historical context for considering some of the significant problems that face American society today.
Howard Markel, MD, PhD (ANN ARBOR, MI), is the George E. Wantz Distinguished Professor of the History of Medicine and the director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan. He is the author of numerous books, including The Secret of Life: Rosalind Franklin, James Watson, Francis Crick, and the Discovery of DNA's Double Helix and When Germs Travel: Six Major Epidemics That Have Invaded America and the Fears They Have Unleashed.
Table of Contents
Figures and Tables Preface to the First EditionPreface to the Updated Edition: Revisiting Quarantine!Introduction: The Concept of QuarantinePart I. Averting a PestilenceThe Typhus Fever Epidemic on New York's Lower East SideChapter 1. The Russian Jews of the SS MassiliaChapter 2. The City Responds to the Threat of TyphusChapter 3. The Results of the Quarantine Part II. "Cholera May Knock, but It Won't Get In!"Cholera, Class, and Quarantine in New York HarborChapter 4. Awaiting the Cholera: "Choleria!"Chapter 5. "Knocking Out the Cholera!"Part III. Legislating QuarantineAttempting to Restrict Immigration as a Cholera PreventiveChapter 6. Maintaining the QuarantineChapter 7. The Doctors' Prescription for QuarantineChapter 8. The Congress RespondsEpilogue: "The Microbe as Social Leveller"NotesIndex
What People are Saying About This
"Markel does the best job I have seen of depicting the experience of the quarantined—as well as explaining something of the political and etiological/prophylactic debates that framed and legitimated the quarantine itself. Along the way he makes substantive contributions to Jewish history, urban history, and public health history."
Sherwin B. Nuland
A remarkable book, uniting the best of the two worlds of social history and clinical history and yet so gripping in narrative style that it kept me fascinated until the very end. Markel is to be congratulated on his ability to write engagingly for a wide variety of readers, while making a major scholarly contribution to the field that continues to be enriched by this work and his example.
— Sherwin B. Nuland, M.D., author of How We Die
Charles E. Rosenberg
Markel does the best job I have seen of depicting the experience of the quarantined—as well as explaining something of the political and etiological/prophylactic debates that framed and legitimated the quarantine itself. Along the way he makes substantive contributions to Jewish history, urban history, and public health history.
— Charles E. Rosenberg, University of Pennsylvania
