Searching Eyes: Privacy, the State, and Disease Surveillance in America Volume 18 - Paperback

by Amy L. Fairchild (Author), Ronald Bayer (Author), James Colgrove (Author)

This is the first history of public health surveillance in the United States to span more than a century of conflict and controversy. The practice of reporting the names of those with disease to health authorities inevitably poses questions about the interplay between the imperative to control threats to the public's health and legal and ethical concerns about privacy. Authors Amy L. Fairchild, Ronald Bayer, and James Colgrove situate the tension inherent in public health surveillance in a broad social and political context and show how the changing meaning and significance of privacy have marked the politics and practice of surveillance since the end of the nineteenth century.

Front Jacket

This is a stunning book--comprehensive and perceptive. Searching Eyes: Privacy, the State, and Disease Surveillance in America is a major achievement in interdisciplinary scholarship and historical interpretation, and will remain the definitive work on this important subject for many years to come.--Theodore M. Brown, Ph.D., Professor of History, Community and Preventive Medicine, and Medical Humanities, University of Rochester

"A landmark in the history and ethics of public health. Meticulously researched, it provides the first overarching account of the evolution of public health surveillance in the United States, from the debates over tuberculosis and venereal disease at the start of the 20th century to the tensions over AIDS and bioterrorism at century's end. Fairchild, Bayer, and Colgrove provide insights not only into how concerns about privacy shaped the politics of public health but also about how the need for protection and services could fuel the demand for extending surveillance. Searching Eyes is invaluable not only for those who want to understand the past but for those who will be called on to make and debate public health policy in the future."--Larry O. Gostin, author of Public Health Law: Power, Duty, Restraint (2nd ed, forthcoming 2008)

Author Biography

The authors are with the Center for History and Ethics of Public Health in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. Amy L. Fairchild, Associate Professor, is the author of Science at the Borders: Immigration Medical Inspection and the Shaping of the Modern Industrial Labor Force (2003). Ronald Bayer, Professor, is the author of many books including Shattered Dreams: An Oral History of the South Africa AIDS Epidemic (2007) with Gerald Oppenheimer. James Colgrove, Assistant Professor, is the author of State of Immunity: The Politics of Vaccination Twentieth-Century America (2006).