The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 coincided with a major wave of immigration to the United States. More than 23.5 million newcomers arrived between 1880 and the 1920s, mostly from Southern and ...Eastern Europe, Asia, Canada, and Mexico. During earlier epidemics, the foreign-born were often stigmatized as disease carriers whose very presence endangered their hosts. Because this influenza struck individuals of all groups and classes throughout the country, no single immigrant group was blamed, although there were many local cases of medicalized prejudice. The foreign-born needed information and assistance in coping with influenza. Among the two largest immigrant groups, Southern Italians and Eastern European Jews, immigrant physicians, community spokespeople, newspapers, and religious and fraternal groups shouldered the burden.They disseminated public health information to their respective communities in culturally sensitive manners and in the languages the newcomers understood, offering crucial services to immigrants and American public health officials.
A professor of history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Walloch’s volume is the perfect scholarly commemoration of Pastor Henning Jacobson’s 1905 unsuccessful legal challenge to the ...Massachusetts law that required all residents of the state to have a smallpox vaccination. The battle against Massachusetts’s compulsory vaccination law was fought in the political arena and even in the streets when health officials sent squads of health department physicians with police escorts into lodging house districts to forcibly vaccinate. Though Jacobson lost the appeal, it is likely that he never actually got vaccinated. ...the constitutionality of compulsory vaccination and appropriate limits of state intervention in matters of the body continue to be argued in courts as the potential of harmful side effects remains a subject of debate in medicine.
In his discussion of Lemuel Shattuck, a pioneer in the collection and analysis of vital statistics, Gehlbach reminds readers that it is impossible to determine the health patterns of any population ...without systematic data collection.Gehlbach's chapters on tuberculosis, polio, cancer, heart disease, and HIV/ AIDS amply demonstrate how advances in medical science resulted in public health programs to curb the spread of some diseases and to prevent others.In his chapter on polio, Gehlbach traces the hundred-year life cycle of the epidemic from its first identification in the 1890s, to the Salk and Sabin vaccines that stopped the catastrophic summer epidemics in the United States, to the current patterns of prevention that have all but extinguished the disease as a world public health threat.
Where were you born? Were you born at the Beth? Many thousands of Americans-Jewish and non-Jewish-were born at a hospital bearing the Star of David and named Beth Israel, Mount Sinai, or Montefiore. ...In the United States, health care has been bound closely to the religious impulse. Newark Beth Israel Hospital is a distinguished modern medical institution in New Jersey whose history opens a window on American health care, the immigrant experience, and urban life. Alan M. and Deborah A. Kraut tell the story of this important institution, illuminating the broader history of voluntary nonprofit hospitals created under religious auspices initially to serve poor immigrant communities. Like so many Jewish hospitals in the early half of the twentieth century, "the Beth" cared not only for its own community's poor and underprivileged, a responsibility grounded in the Jewish traditions of tzedakah ("justice") and tikkun olam ("to heal the world"), but for all Newarkers.Since it first opened its doors in 1902, the Beth has been an engine of social change. Jewish women activists and immigrant physicians founded an institution with a nonsectarian admissions policy and a welcome mat for physicians and nurses seeking opportunity denied them by anti-Semitism elsewhere. Research, too, flourished at the Beth. Here dedicated medical detectives did path-breaking research on the Rh blood factor and pacemaker development. When economic shortfalls and the Great Depression threatened the Beth's existence, philanthropic contributions from prominent Newark Jews such as Louis Bamberger and Felix Fuld, the efforts of women volunteers, and, later, income from well-insured patients saved the institution that had become the pride of the Jewish community.The Krauts tell the Beth Israel story against the backdrop of twentieth-century medical progress, Newark's tumultuous history, and the broader social and demographic changes altering the landscape of American cities. Today, the United States, in the midst of another great wave of immigration, once again faces the question of how to provide newcomers with culturally sensitive and economically accessible medical care. Covenant of Care will inform and inspire all those working to meet these demands, offering a compelling look at the creative ways that voluntary hospitals navigated similar challenges throughout the twentieth century.
Kraut discusses the story of migration to the US and explores new aspects of the immigrant assimilation process. Focusing upon the appearance and health of newcomers, he demonstrates that immigrants' ...bodies have been contested terrain throughout American history. Faced with choices the foreign-born have long understood their bodies to be part of the ongoing negotiation between themselves and their native-born American hosts over the price of opportunity in the US.
Kraut talks about Oscar Handlin's The Uprooted. It is no secret that scholars of immigration and ethnicity have found the saga that Handlin spins wanting in ways both substantive and methodological. ...In his preface to the second edition of The Uprooted, Handlin says that his book tells an "epic story." Of all the criticisms, none is more often quoted by scholars than that by the late Professor Rudolph J. Vecoli, who taught for many years at the University of Minnesota, founding the Immigration History Research Center there. His essay "Contadini in Chicago: A Critique of The Uprooted" appeared in the Dec 1964 issue of the Journal of American History. With great care and in great detail, Vecoli relied on the example of the contadini or townsmen of the Mezzogiorno in Southern Italy who had emigrated to Chicago in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to demonstrate the inadequacy of Handlin's broad-brush approach to the emigration experience of Europe's peasantry.
John Higham's Critique of His Own Work Kraut, Alan M.
The journal of the gilded age and progressive era,
04/2012, Letnik:
11, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In April 2002, the Immigration and Ethnic History Society (IEHS) made its first lifetime achievement award. It was my honor to be president of the IEHS at that time, and I can recall the pleasure and ...unanimity of board members in designating John Higham the first recipient of that honor. It was a special pleasure for me to notify John and to present the award to him because over the years John had become both a personal friend and a powerful intellectual influence. When I called him at his home in Baltimore, he accepted with delight but as always with the soft-spoken graciousness that was his way. We chatted about the fact that initially he had not defined himself as an immigration scholar, yet in 1967, more than a decade after the publication of Strangers in the Land had found himself one of the founding members of what was then called the Immigration History Society and later one of its presidents. As we often did, we also talked about our hometown, New York. John had grown up in Queens, while I had grown up in the South Bronx. On many occasions we discussed how our New York roots had lured us into thinking and writing about immigration and ethnicity.
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