Billy G. Smith, Montana State University, author of
The Lower Sort and coeditor of
A Melancholy Scene of Devastation: The Public Response to the 1793 Philadelphia Yellow Fever Epidemic:
"Simon Finger has provided us with a new take on medical history in early America, one that will reform our traditional perspectives fundamentally. This well-written, well-conceived book includes both the politics and the medicine back into medical history—something that previous scholars have too often failed to accomplish. The Contagious City offers an insightful analysis of how the collective struggles to prevent disease helped create the political and cultural history of Philadelphia in particular and early America in general."
"Simon Finger's 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.... The author makes it clear that medicine and politics were inextricably linked, and that both undergirded the debates over crucial concerns such as Philadelphia’s location, its urban plan, its immigration policy, and its creation of institutions and agencies of public safety."
Herbert Ershkowitz:
"Finger has given readers a very intelligent account of the rise of public health in early America. The material is very well documented, and he has consulted European as well as American sources."
Samuel Otter:
"In his meticulously documented and precisely argued book, Finger tells a story that begins with William Penn and Thomas Holme and extends to the early nineteenth century, when Philadelphia's eminence diminished with the rise of New York City as the nation’s commercial and financial capital and the transfer of the political capital to Washington, D.C.... The Contagious City will be valuable to scholars for is nuanced account of the relationship among the discourses of medicine, politics, and the body."
James A. SchaferJr:
"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 America and the Early Republic... an excellent introduction to the history of medicine in early America for non-specialists. Thanks to Finger, historians of medicine also have a new framework for connecting their field to the interests of colleagues in other fields. I hope that The Contagious City will become standard reading in senior undergraduate electives and graduate seminars.... I know it will in mine."
Rebecca Tannenbaum:
"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 individual body and the body politic; they 'rested on the idea that humans, their environment, and their society operated on analogous principles that were therefore subject to the same kinds of defects and remedies.. Finger provides an excellent short introduction to an aspect of cultural history that has not yet been fully explored."
"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. The Contagious City offers a fresh and convincing view of the linkages between medicine, politics, and culture in Philadelphia's colonial and national eras. With a focus on public health infrastructure and policy it enriches our understanding of a critical development in early American history event as it points the way for further work to be done on these issues."
