Plagues In The Nation

How Epidemics Shaped America

Polly J. Price, 2022, Bvt Lib 614.49 PRI

• book website

• Professor of law and global health at Emory University

  • 25 minute walk from CDC headquarters
• No mention of smallpox variolization of Continental Army
• x preface: Emory University treated the first American health workers evacuated from West Africa in spite of bomb threats
  • panic and squabbles, ineffective political response, conflicts among citizens
• xiii WHO Pandemic: "an epidemic occurring worldwide, or over a very wide area, crossing international boundaries and usually affecting a very large number of people."
  • Epidemic, Websters: "an outbreak of disease that spreads quickly and affects many individuals at the same time"
  • CDC: "Epidemic refers to an increase, often sudden, in the number of cases of a disease above what is normally expected in that population in that area."
  • CDC: "Outbreat carries the same definition of epidemic, but is often used for a more limited geographic area."

• 001 1883 smallpox quarantine hospital ("pesthouse"), potter's field

• 003 early US: Town leaders, justices of the peace, and other government officials had nearly unlimited power to stop an epidemic, threatened or real, unwilling to give federal government means to interfere with local liberties.
• 004 Prevailing judicial attitude = ancient maxim "Salus populi suprema lex", the health of the people shall be the supreme law.
  • Many examples of local action, some quite extreme, untempered by science.
• 006 people hid their illnesses, fearing extreme reaction
• 021 Ch2 Yellow Fever and the Shotgun Quarantine - Southern US through 1905, 200,000 deaths (20,000 in 1878)

• 024 spread by Aedes aegypti mosquito (also dengue, West Nile, and Zika). Yellow fever vaccine in 1938

  • Travel below Yellow fever line (DC, St Louis, El Paso) voided life insurance

  • town by town "shotgun quarantine"
• 029 As a matter of law ... any town could enforce whatever quarantine it saw fit to impose.
• 041 Ch3 Black Death on the West Coast, 1900 bubonic plague in San Francisco Chinatown, quarantined (but not whites) by armed guards
• 051 1900 May 28 struck down in federal court because of racial discrimination

• 053 1924 Los Angeles plague, Clara Street