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

Abstract

Howard Markel's book adds to the growing body of insightful historical literature exploring public health and social responses to disease. It focuses on the cholera and typhus epidemics of 1892, which were not particularly important in terms of the number of people affected but were critical to the racial politics of a city experiencing a large influx of immigrants, including Jews from Russia. After the arrival of the SS Massilia carr ying Russian Jews, a typhus epidemic broke out in New York City. Cyrus Edson, the chief sanitary inspector for New York, focused virtually exclusively on the ship's passengers in his fight to contain the epidemic, even though the evidence was scanty that Russian Jews brought the disease in or that they were its sole victims. Individuals were either sent to the infectious disease hospital or quarantined in the boardinghouses serving as their first destination in New York. The cholera epidemic proved somewhat more difficult to contain, but the focus of public health efforts was the same. This time, William Jenkins, health officer of the Port of New York and chief of the quarantine station, implemented a quarantine of all steerage passengers arriving in ships from Germany and other cholerainfected European ports. The class and racebased nature of those quarantines is evident in the different handling of cabin passengers, who were released immediately upon arrival in port. Steerage passengers were either detained on board their ships or sent to isolation hospitals.