Research Catalog

Title

Science at the borders : immigrant medical inspection and the shaping of the modern industrial labor force / Amy L. Fairchild.

Author

Fairchild, Amy L.

Publication

Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xii, 385 p. : ill.; 24 cm.

Summary

• "In 1891, officers of the U.S. Public Health Service began examining immigrants at the nation's borders for "loathsome and dangerous contagious diseases." First introduced as a means to screen out those who posed a threat to public health, the examinations were soon described by officials as a way of denying entry to applicants who could not work and would therefore be a burden on society. But historian Amy L.
• Fairchild has unearthed a curious fact about this ubiquitous rite of immigration - it was rarely undertaken to exclude immigrants.".
• "In Science at the Borders, Fairchild retells the immigrant story, offering a new interpretation of the medical exam and the role it played in the lives of the 25 million immigrants who entered the United States. She argues that the vast assembly line of flesh and bone served as a kind of initiation into the life of the new working class, one that would introduce men and women from the villages of eastern and southern Europe and elsewhere to the norms and conventions of the factory floor.
• What the overwhelming majority of immigrants endured at Ellis Island and other entry points to the United States, according to Fairchild, was part of a process of induction into American industrial society.".
• "Against this backdrop Fairchild also explores the southern border of the United States and the West Coast where the exam did, in fact, serve to exclude. Throughout, Fairchild conveys the humanity of the story, offering detailed accounts of individual immigrants confronting a large scientific and medical bureaucracy."--BOOK JACKET.

Subjects

• United States
• United States > Emigration and immigration
• Health Policy
• United States > Public Health Service
• Employment
• Labor policy > United States
• Immigrants > Medical examinations > United States
• Public Health
• Emigration and Immigration

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. [285]-376) and index.

Contents

Introduction. Immigration by the Numbers: Rethinking the Immigrant Medical Experience -- 1. Immigrants and the New Industrial Economy -- 2. The Function of Medical Inspection: Restriction, Instruction, and Discipline of the Laboring Body -- 3. The Medical Gaze: Science in Industrial-Era America -- 4. The Shape of the Line: Immigrant Medical Inspection from Coast to Coast -- 5. At the Borders of Science: Diagnostic Technology at the Intersection of Race, Class, Disease, and Industrial Citizenship -- 6. Drawing the Color Line: Racial Patterns of Medical Certification and Exclusion -- Epilogue. The End of the Line: Immigrant Medical Inspection after 1924 -- App. Note on Data Collection, Cleaning, Coding, and Analysis.

ISBN

0801870801

LCCN

2002006242

OCLC

• ocm49699445
• SCSB-4799298

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries