Description: Roberts examines how individuals and institutions--black and white, public and private--responded to the challenges of tuberculosis in segregated Baltimore in the first half of the 20th century. Reactionary white politicians and health officials promoted "racial hygiene" and sought to control TB through Jim Crow quarantines, Roberts explains. African Americans, in turn, protested the segregated, overcrowded housing that was the true root of the tuberculosis problem. Exploring the politics of race, reform, and public health, Roberts uses the tuberculosis crisis to illuminate the limits of racialized medicine and the roots of modern health disparities.
Review Quotes: "Roberts offers a fascinating history of the ways in which racial politics, ideologies, and fears shaped Baltimore's public health responses to TB. An insightful study of the politics of epidemiology, "Infectious Fear" reshapes our understanding of the history of public health, and of race and health in early twentieth-century America."--Keith Wailoo, author of "Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health"