Quarantine!

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.

A remarkable book, uniting the best of the two worlds of social history and clinical history and yet so gripping in narrative style that it kept me fascinated until the very end. Markel is to be congratulated on his ability to write engagingly for a wide variety of readers, while making a major scholarly contribution to the field that continues to be enriched by this work and his example.

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.

Insightful . . . fine and well-written.

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.

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.

Skillfully explores the social, cultural, medical, and political issues surrounding the quarantine of East European Jewish immigrants during the typhus and cholera epidemics in 1892 New York.

With vivid brush strokes Markel sketches in many of the colorful personalities who figured in his tale . . . Quarantine! is a fascinating and moving account.