The 131st Annual Meeting (November 15-19, 2003) of APHA

Abstract #73877

Learning Objectives:

• This year we honor Dr. Howard Markel with the Arthur Viseltear Prize for the outstanding book in the History of Public Health in America. Dr. Markel’s book, Quarantine! East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), has quickly become a classic in the history of public health. This account chronicles the experience New York City’s Russian Jews during the typhus and cholera epidemics of 1892 and in so doing tells several different and remarkable types of story. Quarantine! provides a nuanced, shattering portrait of people victimized by European racial prejudice, poverty, disease, and, finally, public health interventions. He looks behind the narrative to tell a second, more complex story of a public health response driven both by the practical demands of a potential crisis and the need to maintain social control. Ultimately, the book also tells a third story, of how historians’ personal identities and our national identity bear on methodological and interpretive decisions and, consequently, on our memories and the historical record of the larger immigrant experience.

Keywords: Medicare, History

Presenting author's disclosure statement: