I chose to read \u201cExtraordinary and Even Arbitrary Powers\u201d because I was looking to compare and contrast the dialogue of quarantine and public health policies with my own research. I have been looking into federal and state responses to the Yellow Fever Outbreak in the Mississippi River Valley of 1878 and found striking parallels as well as contrasts between the two.<\/p>\n

At Mary Mallon\u2019s time, state and national health boards were still in their early formation stages (more so in the South than the North). But a lot still remained unclear about jurisdiction, funding, and research roles of the boards. It was a time of anxiety in the public health world and policy makers, businessmen, and health officials alike were still sorting out their place in the field. New York\u2019s board, however, as Leavitt writes, had been frontrunner in forming policies since it gained legitimate authority in 1866. She writes, \u201cThe local board soon became the nation\u2019s leader in terms of defining municipal programs to promote health and prevent disease, and its accomplishments were adopted as models across the country\u201d (40).<\/p>\n

And yet, one of the most established boards in the country couldn\u2019t quite figure out what to do with little Mary Mallon. After the yellow fever outbreak in Memphis, state and federal officials blamed the poor sanitation conditions for the epidemic. However, New York was doing fairly well in that regards. They needed to find another way to take action, so they put Mary Mallon in quarantine? \u00a0\u201cWhy was quarantine the first response of the New York officials instead of last resort?\u201d (47)<\/p>\n

John<\/a> wrote that \u201cMary Mallon\u2019s capture and subsequent isolation can be viewed as a manifestation of the belief that it was possible for humankind to conquer disease\u201d and I agree with that to a certain extent. However, there was also just a sense that people did not know what to do with her. And this raises a whole host of ethical questions that Leavitt discusses in this chapter, \u201cWas it necessary to restrain even one person\u2019s individual liberty in order to achieve health?\u201d (69) And yet, there are records that officials believed that their capturing of Mallon was reasonable. And while I agree with Molly<\/a> when she wrote, \u201cThe real disaster, was not the outbreak of typhoid, but Mary\u2019s treatment and the public\u2019s reaction to it\u201d, there was no protocol for dealing with cases like silent-carriers. What is our value criteria for dealing with such sensitive subjects like quarantine? Public officials didn\u2019t really have a good rubric back then \u2013 and even today we are still having similar discussions about the spread of HIV and tuberculosis. \u00a0What is \u201cgood\u201d quarantine?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I chose to read \u201cExtraordinary and Even Arbitrary Powers\u201d because I was looking to compare and contrast the dialogue of quarantine and public health policies with my own research. I have been looking into federal and state responses to the Yellow Fever Outbreak in the Mississippi River Valley of 1878 and found striking parallels as … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “What is a “good” quarantine?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":75,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[24,337,338,405,406],"class_list":["post-668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-anxiety","tag-public-health","tag-quarantine","tag-typhoid","tag-typhoid-mary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/75"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=668"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":838,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668\/revisions\/838"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}