American Contagions: Epidemics and the Law from Smallpox to COVID-19

by John Fabian Witt

Overview

A concise history of how American law has shaped—and been shaped by—the experience of contagion

“Contrarians and the civic-minded alike will find Witt’s legal survey a fascinating resource”—Kirkus, starred review

“Professor Witt’s book is an original and thoughtful contribution to the interdisciplinary study of disease and American law. Although he covers the broad sweep of the American experience of epidemics from yellow fever to COVID-19, he is especially timely in his exploration of the legal background to the current disaster of the American response to the coronavirus. A thought-provoking, readable, and important work.”—Frank Snowden, author of Epidemics and Society
 
From yellow fever to smallpox to polio to AIDS to COVID-19, epidemics have prompted Americans to make choices and answer questions about their basic values and their laws. In five concise chapters, historian John Fabian Witt traces the legal history of epidemics, showing how infectious disease has both shaped, and been shaped by, the law. Arguing that throughout American history legal approaches to public health have been liberal for some communities and authoritarian for others, Witt shows us how history’s answers to the major questions brought up by previous epidemics help shape our answers today: What is the relationship between individual liberty and the common good? What is the role of the federal government, and what is the role of the states? Will long-standing traditions of government and law give way to the social imperatives of an epidemic? Will we let the inequities of our mixed tradition continue?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300257779
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	08/31/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	128
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

John Fabian Witt is the Duffy Class of 1960 Professor of Law and History at Yale, where he serves as Head of Davenport College. He is author of the Bancroft Prize–winning Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 The Sanitationist State 13

Chapter 2 Quarantinism in America 35

Chapter 3 Civil Liberties in an Epidemic? 61

Chapter 4 New Sanitationisms / New Quarantinisms 85

Chapter 5 Masked Faces toward the Past 107

Afterword: Viral Protests 139

Notes 143

Suggested Reading 161

Acknowledgments 165

Index 167

Editorial Reviews

…offers a brisk guide to how epidemics have shaped U.S. law, and how the law has shaped epidemics in turn, taking us from the smallpox outbreaks of the colonies to Covid-19…Witt constructs his argument carefully, rarely allowing himself a rhetorical flourish, but the conclusion he arrives at is devastating. "A decent society," he writes toward the end of American Contagions, "must have legal arrangements that are up to the task of providing for basic needs in crisis times." Faced with this fundamental—and fairly minimal—imperative, the United States has "utterly failed."

The New York Times - Jennifer Szalai

In this brief and readable account, Mr. Witt describes the history of American efforts to prevent pandemics from breaking out and to grapple with them once they do.”—Adam J. White, Wall Street Journal

Eminently accessible, deftly argued, and elegantly written, and it provides a highly original theoretical framework for understanding US reactions to pandemics over the last two centuries. Ultimately, it will enable popular and scholarly audiences alike to understand the prehistory of the decentralized and chaotic legal response to COVID-19.

"Timely. . . . Contrarians and the civic-minded alike will find Witt’s legal survey a fascinating resource."—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

A brisk and concise volume . . . timely and necessary as our societies grapple with the law and policy in a new era of infectious disease pandemics.

"[D]raws on a wealth of historical literature and precedent to craft an original and compelling theoretical framework and prism through which to understand the American reaction to the current pandemic."—Binyamin Blum, Law & Society Review

"[A} startling feat of synthesis in five short chapters"—Sarah B. Dine, Health Affairs

“Witt's book shows that the public health response to any disease cannot be separated from long-standing and powerful ideas about cleanliness, disease control, and who deserves help when ill.”—Theresa Brown, American Journal of Nurses

“With a good mix of solid research . . . and understandable, well-articulated connections between history, law, science, and social science, American Contagions gives much-needed context to COVID-19.”— Courtney Segota, Law Library Journal
 

“This thoughtful text asks readers to reflect upon the ways that epidemics reveal the nation’s weaknesses and its inequities, and to learn from a troublesome past so that we might walk toward a progressive future. A timely and accessible history of public health law.”—Erica Dunbar, Rutgers University

“Professor Witt’s book is an original and thoughtful contribution to the interdisciplinary study of disease and American law. Although he covers the broad sweep of the American experience of epidemics from Yellow Fever to Covid-19, he is especially timely in his exploration of the legal background to the current disaster of the American response to the coronavirus. A thought-provoking, readable, and important work.”—Frank Snowden, author of Epidemics and Society

"With this urgently needed book, John Witt has accomplished the seemingly impossible.  In short order, he has produced a complex, authoritative, and accessible synthetic history of the interrelationship of law, epidemic, and public health regulation in America.  As we again navigate the tortuous crises of pandemic, Witt's long history of the interplay of public safety, state power, legal right, and social exclusion brings a most welcome and necessary perspective and context."—William Novak, author of The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America

“In this masterful book, John Fabian Witt knits together history and law to illuminate how deeply the COVID-19 pandemic has divided America, and how public health crises shape law and democracy itself. He guides us through the most consequential choices of our lifetimes, showing us that America can choose equity, compassion, science, and the rule of law.”—Lawrence O. Gostin, Georgetown University

“Though caused by mysterious agents invisible to the naked eye, epidemics powerfully reveal the deep structures of power, authority, and inequality in human societies. In this timely, engagingly written, and admirably judicious account, John Fabian Witt vividly narrates the long history of American law’s entanglements with deadly diseases, from colonial times to our own, and offers valuable lessons for the American people in the age of COVID-19.”—Michael Willrich, author of Pox: An American History

From the Publisher

★ 2020-08-18
Don’t want to wear a virus-blocking mask? Well, neither did some people a century ago—and the law caught up with them, too.

In a book that’s both timely, considering the pandemic, and remarkably speedy, considering that it began as a spring 2020 Yale Law School class, Bancroft Prize winner Witt looks at the sometimes contending, sometimes cooperating forces of public interest and private liberty in times of epidemic disease. “New germs help make new laws and institutions,” he writes, “yet old ways of doing things shape the course of epidemics and the ways in which we respond to them.” In the earliest years of the republic as now, he observes, there have been two major branches of disease control: the sanitarian and the quarantinist. Then as now, the sanitarian—wear a mask, practice social distancing—has been reserved for the better off, while quarantines have been brought to bear on immigrant and minority populations. So it is that the White House argues with increased urgency for a wall to block putatively disease-bearing border crossers, and so it is that the earliest colonial inhabitants of the Hamptons ordered that “no Indian shall come to towne…until they be free of the small poxe.” Whether Chinese worker, Jewish immigrant, or Irish tenement dweller, quarantinist measures of control applied to the Other, who often could not obey laws imposed by the landed majority, such as having dining and toilet facilities far apart. Witt documents how the federal government has consistently punted health regulations to the states, with results ranging from Michigan’s banning anyone with a venereal disease from marrying to “Typhoid Mary” Mallon’s serving 23 years in involuntary isolation, “never having been convicted of or even charged with a crime.” No matter which regime is followed, writes the author, the current pandemic violates the doctrine that public health is paramount.

Contrarians and the civic-minded alike will find Witt’s legal survey a fascinating resource.

Kirkus Reviews