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Stephen J. Kunitz, John Mckiernan-González. Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the Texas-Mexico Border, 1848–1942., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 3, June 2013, Pages 820–821, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.3.820
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“When our honored and lamented Reed went to Havana and discovered that yellow fever was transmitted by the bite of a mosquito, and Gorgas, by the most brilliant sanitary experiment ever made, put an end to this disease in its very stronghold, they drove the last nail in the coffin of the filth theory of disease. But it is to be feared that the devotees of this theory are loath to bury it, thus violating one of their cardinal principles. It seems to me it is the duty of the health officers of this country to see that this ceremony is properly performed.”
These words were written by Charles V. Chapin, health officer in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1902. They might well have been the epigraph for John Mckiernan-González's book about the way the U.S. Marine and Hospital Service in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries attempted to control the border between Mexico and the United States, focusing especially on Texas. He shows that the then recently discovered germ theory rationalized disease-specific interventions in a way that local environmental sanitary improvement could not; that quarantine was used by the federal government as an instrument of border control and as a way to classify people in racial categories (Mexican, white, colored) for the purposes of determining sources of infection; and that it became a way for public health practitioners to legitimize the growing power of their profession.
