SBR-9520709 Doctoral Dissertation Research: "Bacteriology and the Medical Inspection of Immigrants." This project examines the impact of bacteriology on immigration policy in the U.S. More particularly, it looks at the intersection of bacteriology, immigration, and nationality through the historical examination of medical inspection at American borders, the points at which the nation defended and defined itself. Bacteriology provided a modern medical language of contagion and personal pathology that was used to define disease in terms of national safety. The pathological characteristics ascribed in particular immigrant groups were used in a subtle and complex calculus for defining not simply which diseases or conditions should be excluded, but which peoples should be excluded from the "national body." This project will trace the thesis that bacteriology was essential to the construction of disease, immigrant, and nation through three overlapping components. First, this project will document differences in medical inspection and exclusion by statistical analysis of annual immigration data for all U.S. ports, supplemented by case studies of selected ports along the East, West, and Gulf Coasts. Second, the project describes bacteriology's role in shaping scientific and social understandings of disease and its carriers through an analysis of the disease categories used for the medical diagnosis and exclusion of immigrants. Finally, the project places bacteriology in an international context by exploring its comparative significance in controlling immigration to Canada and Mexico and its role in international negotiations regarding these respective borders.
