Searching Eyes Privacy, the State, and Disease Surveillance in America [Paperback]

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.

The authors are with the Center for History and Ethics of Public Health in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia Universitys Mailman School of Public Health.Amy L. Fairchild,Associate Professor, is the author ofScience 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 includingShattered Dreams: An Oral History of the South Africa AIDS Epidemic(2007) with Gerald Oppenheimer.James Colgrove,Assistant Professor, is the author ofState of Immunity: The Politics of Vaccination Twentieth-Century America(2006).

List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
Foreword by Daniel M. Fox and Samuel L. Milbank
Acknowledgments
Preface: The Politics of Privacy, the Politics of Surveillance
1. Introduction: Surveillance and the Landscape of Privacy in Twentieth-Century America

PART I. THE RISE OF SURVEILLANCE AND THE POLITICS OF RESISTANCE
2. Opening Battles: Tuberculosis and the Foundations of Surveillance
3. Raising the Veil: Syphilis and Secrecy
PART II. EXTENDING SURVEILLANCE: THE POLITICS OF RECOGNITION
4. The Right to Know: Detection, Reporting, and Prevention of Ocl“K