Guenter B. Risse. Plague, Fear, and Politics in San Francisco's Chinatown

Eminent historian of medicine and public health Guenter B. Risse takes a familiar story—the bubonic plague outbreak in San Francisco between 1900 and 1905—and revises it. Although this event looms large in histories of public health, scholars often describe it in abbreviated form as part of a larger narrative about the intersection of race, ethnicity, citizenship, and the development of public health policies in the United States. (Risse himself engaged similar questions in a piece that appeared in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine on the outbreak of plague in San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake.) While Risse's work is conversant with that of Marilyn Chase, Susan Craddock, Alan M. Kraut, Howard Markel, and Nayan Shah, he alters the narrative in three ways. First, Risse's book is a comprehensive treatment dedicated to this single episode. Second, he places the episode within a transnational context. Third, Risse capitalizes on newly translated texts to better document the Chinese perspective, and he unearths new sources to provide a more nuanced assessment of federal officials. As a result, Risse's Plague, Fear, and Politics in San Francisco's Chinatown should now be considered the authoritative text on the subject.

Art · Chinatown · Citizenship · Context (archaeology) · Economic history · Literature · Narrative · Plague (disease) · Political science · Politics · Public history · White (mutation) · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · History of Science and Medicine · Law · Medicine · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies · Gerontology