Resenha Fairchild

Ó Springer 2006

Metascience (2005) 14:423–425 DOI 10.1007/s11016-005-3443-3

REVIEWS

BORDER MEDICINE

Amy L. Fairchild, Science at the Borders: Immigrant Medical Inspection and the Shaping of the Modern Industrial Labor Force. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Pp. xii+385. US$48.00 HB.

By Alison Bashford The sudden proliferation of studies of public health and medicolegal border control in the modern world is intriguing. What was the common scholarly turn that promoted such research in the late 1990s and which resulted in a fascinating wave of studies, often as first books? Was the problematising of ‘borders’ within cultural history one of the intellectual sources? Is this trend part of the ongoing ‘Foucault effect’ (although this book should not be taken as part of that)? Or is it a logical progression in an increasingly complex historiography of public health? Luckily, the broad topic warrants many studies. In this instance, Amy Fairchild’s research and conclusions are different enough from Nayan Shah’s recent Contagious Divides (Berkeley, 2001) and from Alexandra Minna Stern’s work so as to contribute to a fascinating emerging literature, rather than promoting any sort of duplication. Science at the Borders is about the medical inspection of immigrants to the United States from 1891 through the Progressive Era. Although quarantine and immigration measures arguably are always about both exclusion and inclusion to a body politic, historiography to date has focused overwhelmingly on the former. Fairchild radically challenges this focus. Her conclusion from U.S. Public Health Service records is that medical examination (largely at Ellis Island, New York) did not serve a primarily exclusionary purpose: in fact, the numbers of people actively excluded from East