City of Plagues: Disease, Poverty, and Deviance in San Francisco

Abstract

City of Plagues is another of the ever-expanding brood of books sired by Michel Foucault's influential if promiscuous contention that the signifying processes inherent in medical discourses serve disciplinary functions by reinforcing the association of the powerless and marginalized with deviance and danger. The discourses it examines are those inspired among late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century San Franciscan health officials and physicians by epidemic visitations of smallpox and bubonic plague and by the endemic presence of syphilis and tuberculosis. Drawing primarily on published health department reports and medical journal articles, it attempts to show that the bodies most often constructed as disease-ridden and therefore deviant and dangerous were those of the occupants of San Francisco's Chinatown. Thus, City of Plagues endeavors to demonstrate how medical discourse intersects with racial discourse to pathologize racial difference and demonize already undesirable populations. A geographer, Susan Craddock goes beyond exploring the epistemological dimensions of the inscription of disease and deviance and theorizes the way in which discourses on disease and urban populations can, through what she terms a process of “leakage,” pathol-ogize sections of cities, reinforcing popular understanding of them and their inhabitants as dangerous and justifying intrusive and containing actions by city authorities. In short, she theorizes what public health historians have been demonstrating at least since Charles Rosenberg published The Cholera Years in 1962.