Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation (Studies in Social Medicine) - Softcover

Roberts, Samuel Kelton

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807859346 ISBN 13: 9780807859346

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009

Synopsis

For most of the first half of the twentieth century, tuberculosis ranked among the top three causes of mortality among urban African Americans. Often afflicting an entire family or large segments of a neighborhood, the plague of TB was as mysterious as it was fatal. Samuel Kelton Roberts Jr. examines how individuals and institutions--black and white, public and private--responded to the challenges of tuberculosis in a segregated society. Reactionary white politicians and health officials promoted "racial hygiene" and sought to control TB through Jim Crow quarantines, Roberts explains. African Americans, in turn, protested the segregated, overcrowded housing that was the true root of the tuberculosis problem. Moderate white and black political leadership reconfigured definitions of health and citizenship, extending some rights while constraining others. Meanwhile, those who suffered with the disease--as its victims or as family and neighbors--made the daily adjustments required by the devastating effects of the "white plague". Exploring the politics of race, reform, and public health, Infectious Fear uses the tuberculosis crisis to illuminate the limits of racialized medicine and the roots of modern health disparities. Ultimately, it reveals a disturbing picture of the United States' health history while offering a vision of a more democratic future.

About this title

Book Description

"Roberts offers a fascinating history of the ways in which racial politics, ideologies, and fears shaped Baltimore's public health responses to TB. An insightful study of the politics of epidemiology, Infectious Fear reshapes our understanding of the history of public health, and of race and health in early twentieth-century America."--Keith Wailoo, author of Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health

About the Author

Samuel Kelton Roberts Jr. is associate professor of history at Columbia University and assistant professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health.

Edition details

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0807859346
• ISBN 13: 9780807859346
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 328