Quarantine!: East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892
Quarantine!: East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892 Books
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” Quarantine! unites the best of the two worlds of social history and clinical history in a narrative style so private 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
“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. By the side of the way he makes substantive contributions to Jewish history, urban history, and broadcast health history.” — Charles E. Rosenberg, University of Pennsylvania
In Quarantine! Howard Markel traces the course of the typhus and cholera epidemics that swept through New York City in 1892. The tale is told from the top of view of those caught up — the broadcast health doctors who diagnosed and treated the victims, the newspaper reporters who covered the tales, the government officials who customary and enforced policy, and, most significantly, the immigrants themselves. Drawing on seldom cited tales from the Yiddish American press, immigrant diaries and calligraphy, 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.
“Perfectly written and painstakingly researched… This is a fine piece of history with a timely and thoughtful thought; it deserves a wide readership among both health care professionals and professional historians.” — Nancy Tomes, New England Journal of Medicine
“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 vital 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
“With vivid brush strokes Markel sketches in many of the colorful personalities who figured in his tale… Quarantine! is a fascinating and tender account.” — Betty Falkenberg, Pakn Treger
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The history of disease as well as the history
of East European Jews is enhanced by this study.
Dr. Markel drawns on a number of neglected medical
sources and Yiddish language materials to tell
the tale about how Russian Jewish emigres were
treated during successive typhus and cholera
epidemics in New York City in 1892. The book
is insightful in explaining how the disease
outbreaks tended to reinforce negative
perceptions of Jews, and it also helps clarify
the Jewish reaction: comprising a mixture of
dread and rage.
Beyond this Markel pursues a to some extent fashionable
thesis (compare a recent book on Typhoid Mary)
as regards the inherent cruelty and unfairness
of quarantine as a medical course of action: which of
course has evident social and political
ramifications in the Age of AIDS.
This aspect of the book I found less successful,
inasmuch as the unfairness of quarantine should
be perfectly evident and such
man’s-inhumanity-to-man tropes do nothing to
exchange the fact that if a society finds itself
at fantastic risk it will take on board radical, and unfair
procedures, such as quarantine.
Another way in which Markel may be criticized
concerns his inability to clarify just so how
the typhus epidemic was brought by these
unfortunate Jewish emigrants: he seems to reckon
that a stopover in Constantinople was to blame.
It appears that either he was unaware of
Brill-Zinsser disease or else the hypothesis
of that milder form of typhus precipitating an
epidemic below conditions of lice infestation
and reduced immunity was refuted some time ago:
but in any case the concept deserved at least
a footnote.
This but is a quibble and Markel has produced
a fine book strongly not compulsory to anyone interested
in medical history, US history in the Gilded Age,
and East Euro Jewish history.
Rating: 4 / 5
This is a really fascinating account of what might seem like an obscure and narrow topic. But Markel handles this sensitive theme perfectly and manages to balance the specifics of individual experience with general patterns and trends which we can still recognize today in debates about HIV/AIDS and global warming, for example.
Rating: 5 / 5
I couldn’t even get past the first 50 pages.. dull…
I need some chicken soup after this one.
Rating: 3 / 5
Excerpts From THE NEW REPUBLIC, May 26, 1997, pp. 32-37. REVIEW of QUARANTINE! EAST EUROPEAN JEWISH IMMIGRANTS AND THE NEW YORK CIY EPIDEMICS OF 1892 BY HOWARD MARKEL.
BOOK REVIEW by Sherwin B. Nuland
“Despise in the Time of Cholera”
“Remarkable…Engrossing….QUARANTINE! unites the best of the two worlds of social history and clinical history. And it is written in a narrative style so private and gripping that a reader forgets that the book is meant primarily to be a scholarly text. A wide variety of personalities appear in Markel’s detailed study of this slice of American urban culture taken through the part of a well-defined period in our nation’s history. Not only the patients and the broadcast health authorities are brought acutely to life, but so are newspapermen, police, political figures, and leaders of the various Jewish American groups, be they representative of the well-settled Germans or the newly arrived Eastern Europeans. Events and the people who took part in them are presented with an nearness uncommon in the current climate of area and relativism that has lately overtaken the community of historians. Markel is as much spinning a complex yarn as he is writing a scrupulously researched chronicle. Being one of our few card-carrying historians who is also a highly skilled clinical physician, he brings perspectives that would certainly elude his more sociologically minded colleagues. His work is a refreshing waft in a field that is nowadays frequently more windy than enlightening.
Markel resists the temptation to make sweeping statments about philosophy, character and psychology, the sort of empty generalizations that would make him friends in the precincts of multicultural relevance. He restricts himelf to making an right picture of a specific run of events that occurred among specific participants in a specific place at a specific time. He has presented his work in a narrative make that should be the envy of his colleagues in a discipline that has surrendered more and more to the “cholera” of a formalized and recondite do…”
Rating: 5 / 5
I was assigned to read this book for a history course I took at the University of California at Los Angeles. Like most students, I plotting, fantastic, one more book to read. But unlike all the other texts my professor assigned that term–this one blew my socks off! It was fantastic! Well-written, with a pulsating plot, fantastic historical “characters”, clean descriptions of diseases of another time. I am recommending it to all my friends and now to all of you on Amazon. Read “Quarantine!”
Ellen F., Los Angeles
Rating: 5 / 5