Guenter B. Risse, Driven by Fear

Driven by Fear is the most recent monograph by the eminent medical historian of San Francisco, Gunther Risse. His new contribution to the epidemics of America’s west coast ‘Paris’ focuses on the rich history of the city’s pesthouse. Risse presents this institution as both a place and a parable in which multiple disease biographies converge with the racially-motivated abolition of individual rights for the sake of public interest. Risse explores how the history of emotions—such as disgust and fear—is interwoven with the political practices of physical and moral-gatekeeping. He positions the pesthouse firmly at the centre of a wide range of medical and social questions at the turn of the twentieth century and in so doing delivers a new perspective on this unique birthplace of American Public Health. The opening two chapters discuss the pesthouse as a physical location in which the ‘unique blend of environmental circumstances, biological agencies, and cultural contexts’ (p. 29) of epidemic diseases is negotiated via practices of containment. The ‘loathsome diseases’ that left the deepest marks on this social institution of the isolation hospital were smallpox, syphilis, leprosy and the bubonic plague. Despite their diverse biological natures, all these diseases were recurrently associated with San Francisco’s Chinese population who were a common scapegoat. Measures of management as well as practices of isolation, quarantine and separation were, as Risse deftly shows, motivated by a racial and moral rationale.

Criminology · Environmental ethics · Institution · Isolation (microbiology) · Plague (disease) · Political science · Politics · Population · Sociology · Demography · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · History of Science and Medicine · Law · Medicine · Gerontology

• Isis Current Bibliography of the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences 2019

  Francesco Luzzini•Isis•2019

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