Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the Immigrant Menace

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Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the Immigrant Menace

3.45 of 5 stars 3.45 · rating details · 38 ratings · 3 reviews

Epidemics and immigrants have suffered a lethal association in the public mind, from the Irish in New York wrongly blamed for the cholera epidemic of 1832 and Chinese in San Francisco vilified for causing the bubonic plague in 1900, to Haitians in Miami stigmatized as AIDS carriers in the 1980s. Silent Travelers vividly describes these and many other episodes of medicalize...more Epidemics and immigrants have suffered a lethal association in the public mind, from the Irish in New York wrongly blamed for the cholera epidemic of 1832 and Chinese in San Francisco vilified for causing the bubonic plague in 1900, to Haitians in Miami stigmatized as AIDS carriers in the 1980s. Silent Travelers vividly describes these and many other episodes of medicalized prejudice and analyzes their impact on public health policy and beyond. The book shows clearly how the equation of disease with outsiders and illness with genetic inferiority broadly affected not only immigration policy and health care but even the workplace and schools. The first synthesis of immigration history and the history of medicine, Silent Travelers is also a deeply human story, enriched by the voices of immigrants themselves. Irish, Italian, Jewish, Latino, Chinese, and Cambodian newcomers among others grapple in these pages with the mysteries of modern medicine and American prejudice. Anecdotes about famous and little-known figures in the annals of public health abound, from immigrant physicians such as Maurice Fishberg and Antonio Stella who struggled to mediate between the cherished Old World beliefs and practices of their patients and their own state-of-the-art medical science, to "Typhoid Mary" and the inspiring example of Mother Cabrini. Alan M. Kraut tells of the newcomers founding of hospitals to care for their own the "Halls of Great Peace" (actually little more than hovels where lepers could go to die) set up by Chinese immigrants; the establishment of St. Vincent's Hospital in New York as an institution sensitive to the needs of Catholic patients; and the creation of a tuberculosis sanitarium inDenver by Eastern European Jewish tradespeople who managed to scrape together $1.20 in contributions at their first meeting. Tapping into a rich array of sources - from turn-of-the-century government records to an advice book aimed at Italians financed by the DAR, from the photog(less)

Paperback, 384 pages

Published March 1st 1995 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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Dec 22, 2008 Kaitlin added it

Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the Immigrant Menace by Alan M. Kraut (1995)

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Aug 25, 2007 Elizabeth rated it 3 of 5 stars

This was great fun, everything you ever wanted to know about the Plague of 1905 in San Francisco, Cholera, the difference between typhoid and typhus, and what was really incubating in the railroad tenements of the East Village a hundred years before the real estate boom. It seemed a little sub-par academic, mostly just the facts, gleaned from newspaper accounts.

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Oct 20, 2012 Kaeleigh Forsyth rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: skule

Immigrants, am I right? uggh

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