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This book addresses fundamental issues about the last decades of Tsarist Russia, contributing significantly to current debates about how far and how successfully modernisation was being implemented by the Tsarist regime. It focuses on successive outbreaks of cholera in the city of Saratov on the Volga, in particular contrasting the outbreak of 1892 - widely regarded at the time as a national fiasco and a transformative episode for the Russian Empire - with the cholera epidemics of 1904-1910 when - despite completely new scientific discoveries and administrative arrangements - Russia suffered another national outbreak of the disease. The book sets these outbreaks fully in their social, economic, political and cultural context, and explains why a medical and social disaster - which had long since been overcome in other parts of Europe - continued much later in Russia. It explores autocratic government, urban renewal, public health, and disaster management, including the management of widespread public hysteria and social unrest. The book further analyses the assimilation of Western medical knowledge, and the resulting institutional and epistemological changes. Overall, it demonstrates that Russia’s medical history was inseparably linked to the nature of the tsarist regime itself in its confrontation with modernity.

"A tremendous book, the biography of a city which charts the multifarious pathways from bacilli to burgomaster." - Roy Porter, London Review of Books Why were nearly 10,000 people killed in six weeks in Hamburg, while most of Europe was left almost unscathed? As Richard J. Evans explains, it was largely because the town was a “free city” within Germany that was governed by the “English” ideals of laissez-faire. The absence of an effective public-health policy combined with ill-founded medical theories and the miserable living conditions of the poor to create a scene ripe for tragedy. The story of the “cholera years” is, in Richard Evans’s hands, tragically revealing of the age’s social inequalities and governmental pitilessness and incompetence; it also offers disquieting parallels with the world’s public-health landscape today, including the current coronavirus crisis.

This riveting story of the typhus and cholera epidemics that swept through New York City in 1892 has been updated with a new preface that tackles the COVID-19 pandemic. Winner, 2003 Arthur J. Viseltear Prize for Outstanding Book in the History of Public Health, American Public Health Association In Quarantine! Howard Markel traces the course of the typhus and cholera epidemics that swept through New York City in 1892. The story is told from the point of view of those involved—the public health doctors who diagnosed and treated the victims, the newspaper reporters who covered the stories, the government officials who established and enforced policy, and, most importantly, the immigrants themselves. Drawing on rarely cited stories from the Yiddish American press, immigrant diaries and letters, and official accounts, Markel follows the immigrants on their journey from a squalid and precarious existence in Russia's Pale of Settlement, to their passage in steerage, to New York's Lower East Side, to the city's quarantine islands. This updated edition features a new preface from the author that reflects on the themes of the book in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. At a time of renewed anti-immigrant sentiment and newly emerging infectious diseases, Quarantine! provides a historical context for considering some of the significant problems that face American society today.