In this paper I examine the mass medical inspections of immigrants to the United States from the 1890s through the 1920s. I show how, framed as it was not only by nativism and eugenics but also by national industrial imperatives and priorities, scientific medicine served dual purposes. On the one hand, the medical exam was a tool for managing cultural and biological threats to the nation. There were regional variations in medical inspections that reflected the politics of race. On the other hand, the medical exam played an important role in the process of building an unskilled, highly mobile labor force. The industrial demands of the nation provided a rationale for drawing and absorbing millions of European immigrants into the labor force. It was thus a distinct product of the political economy of immigration. It was this second function that characterized the exam for the majority of immigrants entering the nation.
...MoreArticle Davidovitch, Nadav; Zalashik, Rakefet (2006) Medical Borders: Historical, Political, and Cultural Analyses. Science in Context (p. 309).
Book
Fairchild, Amy L.;
(2003)
Science at the Borders: Immigrant Medical Inspection and the Shaping of the Modern Industrial Labor Force
(/isis/citation/CBB000520085/)
Article
Rodriguez, Julia;
(2006)
Inoculating against Barbarism? State Medicine and Immigrant Policy in Turn-of-the-Century Argentina
(/isis/citation/CBB000740720/)
Article
Markel, Howard;
(2000)
“The Eyes Have It”: Trachoma, the Perception of Disease, the United States Public Health Service, and the American Jewish Immigration Experience, 1897-1924
(/isis/citation/CBB000111175/)
Thesis
Shinozuka, Jeannie Natsuko;
(2009)
From a “Contagious” to a “Poisonous Yellow Peril”? Japanese and Japanese Americans in Public Health and Agriculture, 1890s--1950
(/isis/citation/CBB001561058/)
Book
Weaver, Karol K.;
(2011)
Medical Caregiving and Identity in Pennsylvania's Anthracite Region, 1800--2000
(/isis/citation/CBB001200550/)
Chapter
Molina, Natalia;
(2014)
Borders, Laborers, and Racialized Medicalization: Mexican Immigration and U.S. Public Health Practices in the Twentieth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB001553451/)
Article
Shin, J. H.;
(2014)
The “Oriental” Problem: Trachoma and Asian Immigrants in the United States, 1897--1910
(/isis/citation/CBB001422431/)
Article
Robert Bartlett;
Yamaan Saadeh;
(2016)
Victor Vaughan (1851–1929) and the Birth of Bacteriology in the United States
(/isis/citation/CBB802547446/)
Book
Stern, Alexandra;
Markel, Howard;
(2002)
Formative Years: Children's Health in the United States, 1880-2000
(/isis/citation/CBB000201631/)
Book
Abel, Emily K.;
(2007)
Tuberculosis and the Politics of Exclusion: A History of Public Health and Migration to Los Angeles
(/isis/citation/CBB000932812/)
Book
Krista Maglen;
(2014)
The English System: Quarantine, Immigration and the Making of a Port Sanitary Zone
(/isis/citation/CBB997329781/)
Book
Sujani K. Reddy;
(2015)
Nursing and Empire: Gendered Labor and Migration from India to the United States
(/isis/citation/CBB885593890/)
Article
Poliak, Daniel B.;
(2013)
Ritual Circumcision in the Age of Germ Theory amongst Nineteenth-Century New York Immigrants
(/isis/citation/CBB001320604/)
Book
Wallach, Jennifer Jensen;
(2013)
How America Eats: A Social History of U.S. Food and Culture
(/isis/citation/CBB001202133/)
Book
Greta Jones;
(2021)
‘Doctors for Export’: Medical Migration from Ireland c.1860 to 1960
(/isis/citation/CBB145847782/)
Book
Rees, Jonathan;
(2013)
Industrialization and the Transformation of American Life: A Brief Introduction
(/isis/citation/CBB001421332/)
Book
Cinotto, Simone;
(2012)
Soft Soil, Black Grapes: The Birth of Italian Winemaking in California
(/isis/citation/CBB001320946/)
Article
Fred Ash;
(2019)
Yellow Fever Rides the Rails
(/isis/citation/CBB510501438/)
Book
Offit, Paul A.;
(2007)
Vaccinated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases
(/isis/citation/CBB001021088/)
Article
Beemer, Jeffrey K.;
(2009)
Diagnostic Prescriptions: Shifting Boundaries in Nineteenth-Century Disease and Cause-of-Death Classification
(/isis/citation/CBB001231860/)
Be the first to comment!