City of Plagues Disease, Poverty, and Deviance in San Francisco
- Binding: Hardcover
- Publisher: Univ of Minnesota Pr
- Publish date: 04/01/2000
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.