Foreign Bodies: The Perennial Negotiation over Health and Culture in a Nation of Immigrants

by Alan M. Kraut

This essay is the presidential address delivered at the annual meeting of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, held in Memphis on 5 April 2003.

ON THE MORNING OF 19 May 1900, the Chinese community of San Francisco found itself under siege in the name of state and municipal security. It was not fear of bombs or terrorist attack that inspired officials to commit a wholesale violation of civil liberties that morning; it was fear of disease, specifically bubonic plague. An army of city health care workers armed with syringes filled with an experimental serum invaded Chinatown. Doctors cloaked in white coats and masks grabbed anyone of Asian appearance they could and tried to inoculate them against the plague. Few Chinese cooperated willingly. Instead, the community rose in opposition to this intrusive assumption that they posed a dire health threat to their non-Asian neighbors. Chinese merchants closed their stores in protest. Angry Chinese clustered on street corners, their voices and gestures leaving little doubt as to the subject of conversation. All of Chinatown was under quarantine; those Chinese who tried to leave California were turned back at the border unless they could produce a certificate of inoculation. Demands for legal redress from the poor were echoed by the threats of lawsuits from business people.