Germs at Bay

Politics, Public Health, and American Quarantine

Charles Vidich

• Publisher: Praeger
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781440878336
• eBook ISBN:
  9798216089803
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: North American History

Examines America's experience with a wide range of quarantine practices over the past 400 years and the political, economic, immigration, and public health considerations that have prompted success or failure within the evolving role of public health.

The novel strain of coronavirus that emerged in late 2019 and became a worldwide pandemic in 2020 is only one of more than 87 new or emerging pathogens discovered since 1980 that have posed a risk to public health. While many may consider quarantine an antiquated practice, it is often one of the only defenses against new and dangerous communicable diseases. Tracing the United States' quarantine practices through the colonial, postcolonial, and modern eras, Germs at Bay provides an eye-opening look at how quarantine has worked despite routine dismissal of its value.

This book is for anyone seeking to understand the challenges of controlling the spread of COVID-19 and helps readers internalize the lessons learned from the pandemic. Few titles provide this level of primary source data on the United States' long reliance on quarantine practices and the political, social, and economic factors that have influenced them.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Quarantine Grab Bag
• Chapter 2: Quarantine through the Generations: Five Stages of Practice
• Chapter 3: Quarantine in the Colony
• Chapter 4: The Inoculation Controversy
• Chapter 5: Branding the Outcasts: Warning Out and Red Flags
• Chapter 6: Large-Scale Sequestration
• Chapter 7: The Revolutionary War and Its Aftermath: A New Perspective
• Chapter 8: Yellow Fever and the Emergence of Boards of Health
• Chapter 9: Boston Board of Health
• Chapter 10: Vaccination
• Chapter 11: Yellow Fever Outbreak of 1819 and the Excesses of Quarantine
• Chapter 12: Miasma Theory, Maritime Commerce, and Quarantine Restraints
• Chapter 13: Deer Island Quarantine Station
• Chapter 14: Cholera Contagion and the Resurrection of Quarantine
• Chapter 15: Gallop’s Island
• Chapter 16: The Evolution of the Cowpox Vaccine
• Chapter 17: The Smallpox Epidemic of 1872
• Chapter 18: Germ Theory Reframes Quarantine
• Chapter 19: Federal Solutions to Quarantine
• Chapter 20: Boston’s Last Epidemics
• Chapter 21: The End of Boston’s Maritime Quarantine Department
• Chapter 22: Quarantine under U.S. Public Health Service
• Chapter 23: Redefining Quarantine for the Twenty-First Century
• Appendix A: Chronology of Key American Quarantine Events, 1647–2020
• Appendix B: Chronology of Nineteenth-Century Boston Quarantine Ordinances, 1822–1873
• Appendix C: History of Boston’s Port Physicians, 1779–1915
• Appendix D: Quarantine Decision Tree
• Glossary
• About Sources
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author