Metascience (2005) 14:423–425 Ó Springer 2006

DOI 10.1007/s11016-005-3443-3

REVIEWS

BORDER MEDICINE

Amy L. Fairchild, Science at the Borders: Immigrant Medical

Inspection and the Shaping of the Modern Industrial Labor Force.
Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.
Pp. xii+385. US$48.00 HB.

By Alison Bashford

The sudden proliferation of studies of public health and medico-

legal border control in the modern world is intriguing. What was
the common scholarly turn that promoted such research in the
late 1990s and which resulted in a fascinating wave of studies,
often as first books? Was the problematising of ‘borders’ within
cultural history one of the intellectual sources? Is this trend part
of the ongoing ‘Foucault effect’ (although this book should not
be taken as part of that)? Or is it a logical progression in an
increasingly complex historiography of public health? Luckily, the
broad topic warrants many studies. In this instance, Amy Fair-
child’s research and conclusions are different enough from Nayan
Shah’s recent Contagious Divides (Berkeley, 2001) and from
Alexandra Minna Stern’s work so as to contribute to a fascinat-
ing emerging literature, rather than promoting any sort of
duplication.
Science at the Borders is about the medical inspection of immi-
grants to the United States from 1891 through the Progressive Era.
Although quarantine and immigration measures arguably are al-
ways about both exclusion and inclusion to a body politic, histori-
ography to date has focused overwhelmingly on the former.
Fairchild radically challenges this focus. Her conclusion from U.S.
Public Health Service records is that medical examination (largely
at Ellis Island, New York) did not serve a primarily exclusionary
purpose: in fact, the numbers of people actively excluded from East