Description
Book SynopsisThis 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 AssociationIn 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 involvedthe 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
Table of ContentsFigures and Tables
Preface to the First Edition
Preface to the Updated Edition: Revisiting Quarantine!
Introduction: The Concept of Quarantine
Part I. Averting a Pestilence
The Typhus Fever Epidemic on New York's Lower East Side
Chapter 1. The Russian Jews of the SS Massilia
Chapter 2. The City Responds to the Threat of Typhus
Chapter 3. The Results of the Quarantine
Part II. "Cholera May Knock, but It Won't Get In!"
Cholera, Class, and Quarantine in New York Harbor
Chapter 4. Awaiting the Cholera: "Choleria!"
Chapter 5. "Knocking Out the Cholera!"
Part III. Legislating Quarantine
Attempting to Restrict Immigration as a Cholera Preventive
Chapter 6. Maintaining the Quarantine
Chapter 7. The Doctors' Prescription for Quarantine
Chapter 8. The Congress Responds
Epilogue: "The Microbe as Social Leveller"
Notes
Index
