Driven by Fear: Epidemics and Isolation in San Francisco's House of Pestilence (History of Emotions) - Softcover

Risse, Guenter B

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252081382 ISBN 13: 9780252081385

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 2015

Synopsis

From the late nineteenth century until the 1920s, authorities required San Francisco's Pesthouse to segregate the diseased from the rest of the city. Although the Pesthouse stood out of sight and largely out of mind, it existed at a vital nexus of civic life where issues of medicine, race, class, environment, morality, and citizenship entwined and played out. Guenter B. Risse places this forgotten institution within an emotional climate dominated by widespread public dread and disgust. In Driven by Fear, he analyzes the unique form of stigma generated by San Franciscans. Emotional states like xenophobia and racism played a part. Yet the phenomenon also included competing medical paradigms and unique economic needs that encouraged authorities to protect the city's reputation as a haven of health restoration. As Risse argues, public health history requires an understanding of irrational as well as rational motives. To that end he delves into the spectrum of emotions that drove extreme measures like segregation and isolation and fed psychological, ideological, and pragmatic urges to scapegoat and stereotype victims--particularly Chinese victims--of smallpox, leprosy, plague, and syphilis.

Filling a significant gap in contemporary scholarship, Driven by Fear looks at the past to offer critical lessons for our age of bioterror threats and emerging infectious diseases.

About this title

About the Author

Guenter B. Risse is a professor emeritus of the history of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. His books include Plague, Fear, and Politics in San Francisco's Chinatown and Mending Bodies, Saving Souls: A History of Hospitals.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Driven by Fear

Epidemics and Isolation in San Francisco's House of Pestilence

By Guenter B. Risse

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Copyright © 2016 Guenter B. Risse
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-252-08138-5

Contents

List of Illustrations, vii, 
Foreword by Peter N. Stearns, ix, 
Preface, xi, 
Introduction, 1, 
1 Domains of Contagion and Confinement, 21, 
2 Framing "Loathsome" Diseases, 40, 
3 Tides of Inertia and Neglect, 59, 
4 Location: Not in My Backyard, 78, 
5 Banished: Sojourns of the Damned, 97, 
6 Belle of California's Molokai, 115, 
7 Wary Minders: Custodians and Caregivers, 134, 
8 Hope for Cures: Nature or Science, 152, 
9 Modern Isolation: Humanizing Castaways, 171, 
Epilogue, 191, 
Notes, 211, 
Index, 291, 

CHAPTER 1

Domains of Contagion and Confinement

We have seen how the idea of contagion is at work in religion and society. We have seen that powers are attributed to any structure of ideas, and that rules of avoidance make visible public recognition of its boundaries. ... Each culture must have its own notions of dirt and defilement.

— Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (1966)

Miasma and Contagion

"All epidemics," a recent New York Times article proclaimed, "are emotionally alike: an onslaught of fear, awe, repulsion, stigma, denial, rage, and blame." Indeed, such a behavioral cycle guides the search for meaning. The pursuit spawns a number of explanations that attempt to identify and denounce specific culprits: weather, religion, government, and, most commonly, foreign people and their belongings. Sin, for example, has often been invoked as a cause for disease episodes, leading to horrific abuses during the Black Death. Blaming the victim continues to be a common survival skill, employed for defense and self-preservation.

Isolation, for its part, historically involved the banishment and care of already infected persons, promptly exiled to secluded and secure facilities colloquially termed "pesthouses." Justification for such defensive actions rested on the assumption that the bodies of the sick and their possessions exuded vitiated mist in need of containment and eventual dispersion into distant, open air. The classic theory of miasma (a Greek word meaning "pollution" or "polluting agent") held that many diseases arose from foul, poisonous, and localized vapors steaming from the decay and putrefaction of animal and human corpses, excreta, spoiled foodstuffs, and stagnant marshes. Further elaborations of this theory posited the existence of aerial particles, "fomites," or seedlings of disease that could float around, penetrate, and impregnate the body. Although the nature and qualities of these stains or taints remained obscure and their materiality debatable, the overt effects were believed to be harmful and often deadly.

While adverse local environmental conditions or "atmospheric impurities" were habitually blamed for mass-disease outbreaks, the portability of such diseases and their potential for spreading to other regions and new people through person-to person contacts raised early concerns. Trade and commerce, wars, and world exploration all created opportunities for intercourse between people and cargos from different areas of the globe, intercourse that had profound implications for their health. Today we recognize that humans adapt to a complement of potentially harmful microorganisms closely associated with their towns, regions, and countries. However, when such distinct agents, parasites, bacteria, and viruses spread to new territorie

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0252081382
• ISBN 13: 9780252081385
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 316