Science at the Borders

Amy Fairchild is an assistant professor and assistant director for academic and scholarly activities at the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health in the department of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.

• Contents:Acknowledgments List of AbbreviationsIntroduction. Immigration by the Numbers: Rethinking the Immigrant Medical ExperiencePart I. Numbers Large: Immigrant Medical Inspection as an Inclusionary Tool One. Immigrants and the New Industrial Economy Two. The Function of Medical Inspection: Restriction, Instruction, and Discipline of the Laboring Body Three. The Medical Gaze: Science in Industrial-Era AmericaPart II. Numbers Small: Immigrant Medical Inspection as an Exclusionary Tool Four. The Shape of the Line: Immigrant Medical Inspection from Coast to Coast Five. At the Borders of Science: Diagnostic Technology at the Intersection of Race, Class, Disease, and Industrial Citizenship Six. Drawing the Color Line: Radical Patterns of Medical Certification and ExclusionEpilogue. The End of the Line: Immigrant Medical Inspection after 1924Appendix. Note on Data Collection, Cleaning, Coding, and Analysis Notes Index

Her weaving of both [narratives and statistical data] is deft, and her analysis of the numerical data is superb... A touchstone for anyone doing work in either the histories of immigration or public health. An outstanding book, strongly recommended. Choice 2004 The unique contribution of this monograph is the painstaking effort the author has made to set the medical inspections within their historical context. -- Antonio Ugalde Nature Medicine This book should have wide appeal to historians of all specialties, but historians of medicine, labor, and immigration will find it a particularly useful addition to their libraries. -- Cynthia A. Connolly, Ph.D., RN Nursing History Review 2004 The study is extraordinarily well-documented and it is concisely written. It is a thoughtful discussion of a crucial period in the development of the American labor force and the effort of immigration policy to influence its composition when the level of immigration itself was uncontrolled. -- Vernon M. Briggs, Jr. Industrial and Labor Relations Review 2004 This well-written and accessible volume adds considerably to current understandings of the relationship between the industrial, medical, and political agendas that shaped immigrant medical inspections in the first third of the twentieth century. Medical History Through detailed analysis of numbers, combined originally with Foucaultian theory, Fairchild traces changes in the immigrant medical examination to make nuanced and sophisticated arguments... Fairchild's material and analysis make novel and important contributions to immigration history. -- Georgina Feldberg Journal of American History 2004 What this book does really well is explain through the lens of immigrant medical inspections how a governmental bureaucracy employed physicians to enact rituals of inclusion as well as exclusion... Science at the Borders is well written, highly readable, and largely persuasive... Fairchild has done a great deal of statistical work here, and, to her credit, she presents her readers with good reason to care about the numbers. -- Stephen Pemberton Medical Humanities Review 2003 A scholarly effort to reconstruct the multiple purposes of medical inspections of immigrants between 1892 and 1930, when over 25 million people arrived at the US borders. The unique contribution of this monograph is the painstaking effort the author has made to set the medical inspections within their historical context... It is vastly more valuable than a historical description of facts and events. -- Antonio Ugalde Nature Medicine 2004 A major contribution of this book is that Fairchild has assembled an extraordinarily useful set of data from official sources. -- Robert Barde Journal of American Ethnic History 2004 Like the best recent works in American immigration history, Science at the Borders combines rich historical detail with a broad and integrative approach to illuminate multiple aspects of life in early twentieth-century America. Journal of Social History 2005 The book is an original contribution to the growing scholarship on the interwoven histories of U.S. immigration and public health. -- Catherine Ceniza Choy American Historical Review 2005