The English System: Quarantine, Immigration and the Making of a Port Sanitary Zone - Hardcover

Maglen, Krista

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0719089654 ISBN 13: 9780719089657

Publisher: Manchester University Press, 2014

Synopsis

The English System is a history of port health and immigration at a critical moment of transformation at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. During the later nineteenth century, British public health officials transformed the medieval quarantine system into a novel ‘English System’ of surveillance to control the introduction of infectious disease. This removed the much maligned hindrances of quarantine to high-speed international commerce and for maritime traffic through Britain’s ports. At the same time, calls were made to restrict the arrival of increasing numbers of European immigrants and transmigrants. This book explores the tensions and transition in the regulation of port health from a paradigm focused on the origin of disease to one which converged on the origin of the diseased. -- .

About this title

About the Author

Krista Maglen is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Indiana University Bloomington

From the Back Cover

The English System is a history of port health and immigration at a critical moment of transformation at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. It challenges generally held assumptions that quarantine policies delineated intransigent national borders, and argues instead that the British geo-body was defined as a more fluid construction.

A combination of port sanitation and sanitary surveillance, known to contemporaries as the 'English System', was gradually introduced as an alternative to obstructive quarantines at a time of growing international commerce. Yet at the same time escalating anti-alien anxieties sought to restrict the movement of migrants and transmigrants who arrived from the Continent in increasing numbers. With the abolition of quarantine in 1896, the importance of disease categories based on place, which had formed its foundation and which had been adapted for the new 'English System, ' lessened. However, these categories had not collapsed but were merely transferred. This book examines this crucial transition showing how the classification of 'foreign' and 'domestic' disease was translated, after the abolition of quarantine and during the period of mass migration, to 'foreign' and 'domestic' bodies - or the immigrant and the native population. It will be essential reading for any student or scholar of the history of medicine and public health in Britain or North America.

Edition details

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0719089654
• ISBN 13: 9780719089657
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256