Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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!

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!

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"

I was assigned to read this book for a history course I took at the University of California at Los Angeles. Like most students, I thought, great, one more book to read. But unlike all the other texts my professor assigned that term--this one blew my socks off! It was great! Well-written, with a pulsating plot, great historical "characters", neat descriptions of diseases of another time. I am recommending it to all my friends and now to all of you on Amazon. Read "Quarantine!"

Ellen F., Los Angeles

This is a really interesting account of what might seem like an obscure and narrow topic. But Markel handles this sensitive subject beautifully and manages to balance the specifics of individual experience with general patterns and trends which we can still recognize today in debates about HIV/AIDS and global warming, for example.

I couldn't even get past the first 50 pages.. dull...

I need some chicken soup after this one.

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..."

The history of disease as well as the history
of East European Jews is enhanced by this study.
Dr. Markel drawns on a number of neglected medical
sources and Yiddish language materials to tell
the story about how Russian Jewish emigres were
treated during successive typhus and cholera
epidemics in New York City in 1892. The book
is insightful in explaining how the disease
outbreaks tended to reinforce negative
perceptions of Jews, and it also helps explain
the Jewish reaction: comprising a mixture of
fear and anger.

Beyond this Markel pursues a somewhat fashionable
thesis (compare a recent book on Typhoid Mary)
concerning the inherent cruelty and unfairness
of quarantine as a medical procedure: which of
course has obvious social and political
ramifications in the Age of AIDS.

This aspect of the book I found less successful,
inasmuch as the unfairness of quarantine should
be perfectly obvious and such
man's-inhumanity-to-man tropes do nothing to
change the fact that if a society finds itself
at great risk it will adopt radical, and unfair
procedures, such as quarantine.

Another way in which Markel may be criticized
concerns his inability to explain exactly how
the typhus epidemic was brought by these
unfortunate Jewish emigrants: he seems to think
that a stopover in Constantinople was to blame.
It appears that either he was unaware of
Brill-Zinsser disease or else the hypothesis
of that milder form of typhus precipitating an
epidemic under conditions of lice infestation
and reduced immunity was refuted some time ago:
but in any case the concept deserved at least
a footnote.

This however is a quibble and Markel has produced
a fine book strongly recommended to anyone interested
in medical history, US history in the Gilded Age,
and East Euro Jewish history.