Quarantine! East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892

by Howard Markel

Book Overview

Winner of the Arthur Viseltear Award for Outstanding Book in the History of Public Health in the Medical Care Section from the American Public Health Association

In Quarantine! Howard Markel traces the course of the typhus and cholera epidemics that swept through New York City in 1892. The story is told from the point of view of those involved--the public health doctors who diagnosed and treated the victims, the newspaper reporters...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801861802
• ISBN13: 9780801861802
• Release Date: May 1999
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.8" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

A Wonderful Book! The American "Hot Zone" of the 1890s

Quarantine is a wonderful book! Dr. Markel has written an excellent history of epidemics in New York City during the 1890s--which was a true-life Hot Zone for cholera and typhus. Richly illustrated and beautifully written!

THE best book I have read on epidemics!

I have read a lot of books on epidemics and american history and I must say this is the best I have read. Markel does a superb job of bringing the reader right into the hearts and minds of those involved in the epidemics in New York of 1892. He also manages to tell a hell of a good story. No boring historical monograph--this is a scholarly thriller--well documented and well told. I loved it!

Brilliant! A compelling and beautifully told story.

I just finished reading Quarantine! and found it to be the best book I have read in years. A compelling story of two epidemics imported into the United States by Russian Jewish immigrants, the author recounts day by day the events with a vibrancy that is so often missing from historical books. Markel is to be congratulated on telling his story without the crutches of jargon or bias. Each perspective, those of the immigrants themselves, the physicians treating them, New Yorkers, government officials and so on, is handled with brilliance, sensitivity and meticulous research. One really gets a sense of the horrors of "the quarantine" from Dr. Markel's book and I want to thank him profusely for a wonderful reading experience. Bravo!Signed, "The Constant Reader"

The New Republic's Review of Quarantine!

Excerpts From THE NEW REPUBLIC, May 26, 1997, pp. 32-37. REVIEW of QUARANTINE! EAST EUROPEAN JEWISH IMMIGRANTS AND THE NEW YORK CIY EPIDEMICS OF 1892 BY HOWARD MARKEL. BOOK REVIEW by Sherwin B. Nuland "Hate in the Time of Cholera" "Remarkable...Engrossing....QUARANTINE! unites the best of the two worlds of social history and clinical history. And it is written in a narrative style so personal and gripping that a reader forgets that the book is meant primarily to be a scholarly text. A wide variety of personalities appear in Markel's detailed study of this slice of American urban culture taken through the length of a well-defined period in our nation's history. Not only the patients and the public health authorities are brought vividly to life, but so are newspapermen, police, political figures, and leaders of the various Jewish American groups, be they representative of the well-settled Germans or the newly arrived Eastern Europeans. Events and the people who took part in them are presented with an immediacy uncommon in the current climate of specialization and relativism that has lately overtaken the community of historians. Markel is as much spinning a complex yarn as he is writing a scrupulously researched chronicle. Being one of our few card-carrying historians who is also a highly skilled clinical physician, he brings perspectives that would certainly elude his more sociologically minded colleagues. His work is a refreshing zephyr in a field that is nowadays frequently more windy than enlightening. Markel resists the temptation to make sweeping statments about philosophy, character and psychology, the sort of empty generalizations that would make him friends in the precincts of multicultural relevance. He restricts himelf to creating an accurate picture of a specific series of events that occurred among specific participants in a specific place at a specific time. He has presented his work in a narrative fashion that should be the envy of his colleagues in a discipline that has surrendered more and more to the "cholera" of a formalized and recondite practice..."