Health and Disease

Combating Epidemics at the Turn of the Century
Coercion and quarantine were the methods most often employed to combat disease, usually in the midst of an outbreak rather than as a preventive measure. Immigrants were encouraged to keep their bodies and homes clean by public health officials as well as by private hospitals set up for them by their nervous native-born counterparts. Visiting nurses told the sick to put down their folk remedies and visit hospitals, a place many superstitious immigrants associated with certain death.

Guidelines for quarantine were set up by the late 18th century and were instituted almost without exception only on steerage class passengers and tenement buildings. Ships docked in New York went through inspection, and were sometimes detained for weeks with steerage passengers still on board. Immigrants that had managed to stay healthy during the perilous trip over often contracted diseases from their shipmates and died within sight of America's shores.

Others were removed from ships or their tenement homes to equally dismal and unsanitary quarantine stations on North Brother, Hoffman or Swinburne Islands. All suspect tenements on the Lower East Side were barricaded during an epidemic. Men were not allowed to go to work, women to shop, or children to play outside their overcrowded homes. One can only imagine the economic, social and physical distress that city-imposed quarantines caused. Quarantine ultimately served to protect the middle and upper classes from the immigrant class, rather than benefit society as a whole.

Quarantine and finger pointing is unfortunately not a thing of the distant past. As recently as in 1992, 140 Haitian refugees were denied admission to the United States on the basis of their being HIV positive. The Haitians that had already settled here in the late 1980s and early 1990s suffered the stigma of association with the disease. Many lost jobs, or were denied housing or educational opportunities because of their "high risk" ethnic background. Epidemics of contagious disease are still with us, as is the phenomenon of "quarantine by ethnicity" and class.