|
 |
|
City of Plagues Disease, Poverty, and Deviance in San Francisco Susan Craddock |
|
$67.50 cloth/jacket |
An eye-opening discussion of the ways disease shapes urban society. Disease may not discriminate, but it helps those who do. When smallpox struck many areas of San Francisco during the nineteenth century, the Chinese were only one of the populations affected, yet they were blamed for its spread. Tuberculosis in the early twentieth century disproportionately affected poor immigrants, but it also negatively informed social policy about poverty and poor neighborhoods. Addressing these diseases meant undertaking social, physical, and symbolic realignments of the city, processes that come into sharp relief in City of Plagues, an absorbing look at the role of disease and health policy in the construction of race, gender, and class, and in urban development in nineteenth- and twentieth-century San Francisco. Because of its association with medicine, health policy is generally perceived as objective. Yet, as this book demonstrates, its interpretive responses to disease have determined the social location and material reality of those groups at real or perceived risk. Focusing on San Francisco between 1860 and 1940, Susan Craddock considers tuberculosis, plague, smallpox, and syphilis as diseases whose devastations were derived in part from their use as political tools and disciplinary mechanisms. She shows how health policy, by concentrating its responses to smallpox and plague on Chinatown and the Chinese, profoundly influenced the physical look and social location of the Chinese community. She also reveals how the city's antituberculosis campaign, while leaving the disease's root causes untouched, promoted social and domestic restructuring, particularly in its emphasis on women's roles as "health-gatekeepers," maintainers of the values of hygiene, nutrition, and sanitation. Recent instances of AIDS in San Francisco and tuberculosis in New York suggest that little has changed-and that, as Craddock argues, unless health policies begin to address economic inequity, poor housing, and racial and gender discrimination, then disease will continue to characterize and shape urban society. "City of Plagues should fuel excitement and increase other geographers' notice of the remarkable work emanating from it. There are so many grounds on which to recommend this book. It will not disappoint. The most impressive facet of City of Plagues is that it simply and brilliantly traces how the often-argued triad of power/knowledge/space actually works in a particular place, at a particular time, around a particular issue. Craddock's research is one of the most meticulous, nuanced, and thorough monographs of critical human geography I have ever read." —Michael Brown, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space "This book provides an engaging, readable, and well-researched account of the social, political, and medical responses to infectious diseases in San Francisco from the mid-19th century up until the present day. A wealth of material is brought together to describe, in a geographical, historical, and cultural framework, the experience, among San Francisco's population, of diseases such as tuberculosis, smallpox, syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases, plague, and, latterly, HIV and AIDS." —Environment and Planning A “Susan Craddock explores the institutional and administrative responses to smallpox, plague, cholera, tuberculosis, and sexually transmitted diseases in the rapidly growing city of San Franicsco from 1860 through the 1940s. A fascinating perspective on medical geography in a historical context.” —Historical Geography “Craddock has provided a nuanced and informative historical study of San Francisco that reveals the ways in which its Caucasian leadership responded to the pressing issues generated over a century by a number of devastating diseases.” —Isis “Susan Craddock’s provocative work offers an invaluable perspective on public health and the construction of race that speaks not only to the past abut also to the present.” —Bulletin of the History of Medicine Susan Craddock is assistant professor of women's studies and geography at the University of Arizona, Tucson. 272 pages | 22 black-and-white photos, 12 figures | 5-7/8 x 9 | 2000 (cloth), 2004 (paper) TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Tuberculosis, Tenements, and the Epistemology of Neglect Notes |
||
$22.50 paper