{"product_id":"quarantine-east-european-jewish-immigrants-and-the-new-york-city-epidemics-of-1892","title":"Quarantine!: East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eBook info:\u003c\/strong\u003e Quarantine!: East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892 (Hardcover, 280 pages) – The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Language: English.\u003c\/p\u003e\n \u003cp\u003e\" Quarantine! unites the best of the two worlds of social history and clinical history in a narrative style so personal and at times gripping that a reader forgets that the book is meant primarily to be a scholarly text... Markel is as much spinning a complex yarn as he is writing a scrupulously researched chronicle.\"--Sherwin B. Nuland, M.D., New Republic\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"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\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn 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. 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Beautifully written and thoroughly researched... This is a fine piece of history with a timely and thoughtful message; it deserves a wide readership among both health care professionals and professional historians.\"--Nancy Tomes, New England Journal of Medicine\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"One of the major strengths of the book is the balance between the social construction of disease and the biological realities of illness... Quarantine! therefore provides an important cautionary tale not only for historians, but also for medical professionals who need to deal with modern epidemics in a rational and humane manner.\"--Heather Munro Prescott, New York History\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"With vivid brush strokes Markel sketches in many of the colorful personalities who figured in his tale... Quarantine! is a fascinating and moving account.\"--Betty Falkenberg, Pakn Treger\u003c\/p\u003e  \n        From Kirkus Reviews   A revealing cultural and medical history that demonstrates how eastern European Jews, already subject to a kind of social quarantine, became the scapegoats when typhus and cholera struck New York City in 1892. Markel, a clinicial historian who now directs the Historical Center for Health Sciences at the University of Michigan Medical School, documents the quarantine year through immigrant diaries and letters, Jewish social-agency reports, government files, and the press--both Yiddish and American. Liberal use of photographs, maps, cartoons, diagrams, and drawings add to the impact of Markel's powerful narrative. When an outbreak of typhus fever in January 1892 was traced to the SS Massilia, which carried 268 Russian Jewish immigrants, every single one, sick and healthy alike, along with several thousand healthy Jews with whom they had been in contact, were quarantined on North Brother Island in the East River. The focus was not on treatment of the ill but on isolation of the suspect group and protection of the native-born. Later that year, when cholera struck, Russian Jewish immigrants were again targeted. Whereas the typhus epidemic had been managed by the New York City Health Department, the cholera outbreak brought federal and state authorities into contentious play. Markel reveals how prejudice, fear, and anti-immigrant sentiment shaped both public reaction and official policy. He points out that the intertwining of immigration policy with fear of imported disease and social scapegoating that marked this episode in our history continues to the present day, and he notes that responses to future public health crises will be as much a measure of society's perceptions of health, disease, and individual rights as they are of medical and scientific understanding. A valuable contribution to the history of public health in America, to New York City history, and to American Jewish history. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.           Review   \u003cp\u003e\"Skillfully explores the social, cultural, medical, and political issues surrounding the quarantine of East European Jewish immigrants during the typhus and cholera epidemics in 1892 New York.\" -- Library Journal\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Insightful... fine and well-written.\" -- Susan Craddock, Journal of American History\u003c\/p\u003e           Review   \u003cp\u003e\"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\u003c\/p\u003e           About the Author   \u003cp\u003eHoward Markel is an associate professor of pediatrics and communicable diseases, and Director of the Historical Center for the Health Sciences at the University of Michigan Medical School.\u003c\/p\u003e      ","brand":"Professor Howard Markel MD PhD","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46070082306282,"sku":"9780801855122","price":24.45,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0714\/5301\/6298\/files\/71RskeWDIZL._SL1500.jpg?v=1781242232","url":"https:\/\/textbookme.store\/products\/quarantine-east-european-jewish-immigrants-and-the-new-york-city-epidemics-of-1892","provider":"TextbookMe","version":"1.0","type":"link"}