" Quarantine! unites the best of the two worlds of social history and clinical history in a narrative style so personal and at times gripping that a reader forgets that the book is meant primarily to be a scholarly text... Markel is as much spinning a complex yarn as he is writing a scrupulously researched chronicle." -- Sherwin B. Nuland, M.D., New Republic

"Markel does the best job I have seen of depicting the experience of the quarantined -- as well as explaining something of the political and etiological/prophylactic debates that framed and legitimated the quarantine itself. Along the way he makes substantive contributions to Jewish history, urban history, and public health history." -- Charles E. Rosenberg, University of Pennsylvania

In Quarantine! Howard Markel traces the course of the typhus and cholera epidemics that swept through New York City in 1892. The story is told from the point of view of those involved -- the public health doctors who diagnosed and treated the victims, the newspaper reporters who covered the stories, the government officials who established and enforced policy, and, most importantly, the immigrants themselves. Drawing on rarely cited stories from the Yiddish American press, immigrant diaries and letters, and official accounts, Markel follows the immigrants on their journey from a squalid and precarious existence in Russia's Pale of Settlement, to their passage in steerage, to New York's Lower East Side, to the city's quarantine islands. At a time of renewed anti-immigrant sentiment and newly emerging infectious diseases, Quarantine! provides a historical context for considering some of the significant problems that face American society today.

"Beautifully written and thoroughly researched... This is a fine piece of history with a timely and thoughtful message; it deserves a wide readership among both health care professionals and professional historians." -- Nancy Tomes, New England Journal of Medicine

"One of the major strengths of the book is the balance between the social construction of disease and the biological realities of illness... Quarantine! therefore provides an important cautionary tale not only for historians, but also for medical professionals who need to deal with modern epidemics in a rational and humane manner." -- Heather Munro Prescott, New York History

"With vivid brush strokes Markel sketches in many of the colorful personalities who figured in his tale... Quarantine! is a fascinating and moving account." -- Betty Falkenberg, Pakn Treger

Signed, "The Constant Reader"


I loved this book!   June 28, 2001
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

I was assigned to read this book for a history course I took at the University of California at Los Angeles. Like most students, I thought, great, one more book to read. But unlike all the other texts my professor assigned that term--this one blew my socks off! It was great! Well-written, with a pulsating plot, great historical "characters", neat descriptions of diseases of another time. I am recommending it to all my friends and now to all of you on Amazon. Read "Quarantine!"

Ellen F., Los Angeles


The New Republic's Review of Quarantine!   June 18, 1997
Excerpts From THE NEW REPUBLIC, May 26, 1997, pp. 32-37. REVIEW of QUARANTINE! EAST EUROPEAN JEWISH IMMIGRANTS AND THE NEW YORK CIY EPIDEMICS OF 1892 BY HOWARD MARKEL. BOOK REVIEW by Sherwin B. Nuland "Hate in the Time of Cholera" "Remarkable...Engrossing....QUARANTINE! unites the best of the two worlds of social history and clinical history. And it is written in a narrative style so personal and gripping that a reader forgets that the book is meant primarily to be a scholarly text. A wide variety of personalities appear in Markel's detailed study of this slice of American urban culture taken through the length of a well-defined period in our nation's history. Not only the patients and the public health authorities are brought vividly to life, but so are newspapermen, police, political figures, and leaders of the various Jewish American groups, be they representative of the well-settled Germans or the newly arrived Eastern Europeans. Events and the people who took part in them are presented with an immediacy uncommon in the current climate of specialization and relativism that has lately overtaken the community of historians. Markel is as much spinning a complex yarn as he is writing a scrupulously researched chronicle. Being one of our few card-carrying historians who is also a highly skilled clinical physician, he brings perspectives that would certainly elude his more sociologically minded colleagues. His work is a refreshing zephyr in a field that is nowadays frequently more windy than enlightening. Markel resists the temptation to make sweeping statments about philosophy, character and psychology, the sort of empty generalizations that would make him friends in the precincts of multicultural relevance. He restricts himelf to creating an accurate picture of a specific series of events that occurred among specific participants in a specific place at a specific time. He has presented his work in a narrative fashion that should be the envy of his colleagues in a discipline that has surrendered more and more to the "cholera" of a formalized and recondite practice..."