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Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown
by Nayan Shah (American Crossroads), 384
pp, with illus, paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-520-22629-1, Berkeley, Calif, University
of California Press, 2001.
JAMA. 2002;288:103.
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Nayan Shah's book is a nuanced, lucidly written and well-researched
account of the public health assimilation of Asians, above all Chinese, in
the Bay Area during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Shah documents
the way in which the Chinese went from being regarded as dangerous outsiders
in epidemiological and sexual terms to the position they hold today as consummate
members of the mainstream.
Starting in the mid-1900s, Chinese immigrants were regarded as importers
of epidemic diseases, such as smallpox, cholera, tuberculosis, and typhoid
fever, and their neighborhoods and living conditions were seen as a menace
to other parts of San Francisco. Their domestic habits, above all the prevalence
of men unaccompanied by spouses who lived in various forms of temporary housing
and allegedly provided a steady demand for prostitution, were thought to undermine
the dictates of white bourgeois society. They were also the victims of campaigns
promoted by . . . [Full Text of this Article]
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