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About
By the time William Penn was planning the colony that would come to be called Pennsylvania, with Philadelphia at its heart, Europeans on both sides of the ocean had long experience with the hazards of city life, disease the most terrifying among them. Drawing from those experiences, colonists hoped to create new urban forms that combined the commercial advantages of a seaport with the health benefits of the country. The Contagious City details how early Americans struggled to preserve their collective health against both the strange new perils of the colonial environment and the familiar dangers of the traditional city, through a period of profound transformation in both politics and medicine. Philadelphia was the paramount example of this reforming tendency. Tracing the city's history from its founding on the banks of the Delaware River in 1682 to the yellow fever outbreak of 1793, Simon Finger emphasizes the importance of public health and population control in decisions made by the city's planners and leaders. He also shows that key figures in the city's history, including Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush, brought their keen interest in science and medicine into the political sphere. Throughout his account, Finger makes clear that medicine and politics were inextricably linked, and that both undergirded the debates over such crucial concerns as the city's location, its urban plan, its immigration policy, and its creation of institutions of public safety. In framing the history of Philadelphia through the imperatives of public health, The Contagious City offers a bold new vision of the urban history of colonial America.
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Reviews
"Instead of looking solely at what twenty-first-century people perceive as 'public health,' Finger defines his topic as an eighteenth-century Philadelphian would have. Public health was not just a matter of keeping the streets clean and the water pure, but of constructing a 'healthy' polity and a virtuous citizenship. As Finger says in his introduction, ideas of 'health' applied equally to the ind
Rebecca Tannenbaum, American Historical Review
"The Contagious City is an ambitious book that reintegrates the histories of eighteenth-century American medicine and politics. Focusing on Philadelphia, Simon Finger's work deftly reveals a variety of connections between these areas and convincingly argues that public health and political culture were often inextricably tangled together, acting in mutually constitutive ways throughout the century
Journal of American History
"In his erudite and well-written book, The Contagious City, Simon Finger endeavors 'not just to provide a medical history that doesn't have the politics taken out, but rather to offer up a political and cultural history with the medicine put back in' (p. xi). He succeeds mightily in this regard, and the reader is rewarded with a fresh perspective on the politics of public health in colonial Americ
James A. Schafer Jr, Social History of Medicine