Our Witch Doctors hide behind the respectability of white coats and
stethoscopes, black coats and white collars, and prestigious titles.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/5/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I'm not suggesting that we read the book. I just thought this review
contains some interesting information.
Miriam
NONFICTION. Locking Her Up. By CYNTHIA GORNEY. Cynthia Gorney, a professor
emerita at the School of Journalism at the University of California,
Berkeley, is the author of 'Articles of Faith: A Frontline History of the
Abortion Wars. THE TRIALS OF NINA McCALL Sex, Surveillance, and the
Decades-
Long Government Plan to Imprison 'Promiscuous' Women By Scott W. Stern 356
pp. Beacon Press. $28.95. One
October morning in 1918, an 18-year-old named Nina McCall walked out of the
post office in St. Louis, Mich., where she lived with her widowed mother.
Waiting for her on the sidewalk was the town's deputy sheriff, who ordered
her to report to the local health officer for a medical exam. Why he
singled
out McCall we may never know, but the exam left her bleeding, traumatized
and outraged. When the officer declared her to be infected with gonorrhea,
McCall protested that she had never been intimate with a man. At which
point, as Scott Stern writes in his impressively researched book, 'The
Trials of Nina McCall,' the doctor 'turned on her and thundered, with all
the authority of his position and his gender, 'Young lady, do you mean to
call me a liar? Stern's is the first book-length account of the 'American
Plan,' a government-sponsored 'social hygiene' campaign under which
thousands of American women between the early years of the 20th century and
the 1960s were forced to undergo gynecological exams, quarantine and
detention, all in the name of protecting the country's citizens from
sexually transmitted infections. Stern was a freshman in a lecture course
at
Yale when his professor mentioned that government efforts to combat
sexually
transmitted disease had included confining prostitutes to concentration
camps. As Stern recounts, he stopped taking notes and turned to Google: 'I
typed in 'concentration camps for prostitutes. Nothing. I went to Wikipedia
and entered the same search. Nothing. This was strange. Stern, now a law
student at Yale, went on to spend years examining records, including
administrative notes, century-old news stories and social workers' field
reports. The book he eventually pieced together, which in earlier form
earned him an undergraduate thesis award, is startling, disturbing and
terrifically readable. Using McCall's saga as a narrative spine, Stern
chronicles the nationwide network of laws and policies targeting
prostitutes
and any other woman whose alleged sexual activity made her a potential
carrier of venereal disease. No proof that a woman was selling sex for pay
was required in order to haul her in for testing. Local police and health
officials targeted women who in their view acted too flirtatious, enjoyed
themselves too much around soldiers or simply worked as waitresses. In one
Louisiana town near an Army installation, a woman was forcibly examined
because she'd been spotted dining in a restaurant alone. Women of color
were
rounded up in especially high numbers; Stern cites officials who
'enthusiastically warned that nonwhite women were less moral, intent on
infecting soldiers and that blacks in particular were a 'syphilis soaked
race. On paper, the laws of the American Plan were gender-neutral,
applicable to 'any person reasonably suspected by the health officer of
being infected with any of the said diseases. In practice, the laws
targeted
women, and those judged to be infected were quarantined in jails, converted
hospitals and former brothels fitted out with barbed wire-topped walls.
Breakouts and rebellions were common: In Los Angeles, women hacked through
a
fence with a stolen butcher knife; in Seattle, they tied up the guards in
sheets and busted through plate glass. 'In one wing of the horribly
overcrowded Louisville jail,' Stern writes, 'quarantined women staged a
riot
about once a week. American authorities didn't invent the blame-loose-women
approach to stamping out venereal disease; they imported it from Europe. In
19th-century Paris, Stern reports, under what was known as the French Plan,
prostitutes were made to bare their genitals before health inspectors.
Those
found to be infected could be jailed and compelled to undergo mercury
injections, then the standard, if mostly ineffective, treatment for
venereal
disease. ('Throbbing pain, kidney damage, inflammation or ulceration of the
mouth and terrible skin rashes' were typical side effects, Stern writes.)
It
wasn't until the 1940s that doctors understood that penicillin could knock
out syphilis and gonorrhea. When Nina McCall was quarantined in 1918 --
bullied into three months inside a Michigan 'detention hospital' -- she was
injected with the toxins then still in fashion: mercury and, Stern
surmises,
remedies based on arsenic. Her teeth loosened. Her hair started falling
out.
She pleaded to go home. She insisted she'd been falsely suspected of
consorting with 'soldier boys'; Stern found evidence suggesting that she
may
never have had a sexually transmitted infection. We know all this now
because after McCall was finally allowed to leave, she was sought out by a
woman of means who hated the American Plan, had heard about her case and
proposed that McCall sue the government for damages. Stern presents an
intriguing cast of characters and ratchets up the tension as McCall's
lawsuit materializes: Her benefactress is a Christian Scientist opposed to
government-mandated medical treatment; two of the lawyers on either side
are
bitterly combative rivals. The trial transcripts supply fine courtroom
drama, but the story doesn't end there. McCall lost her case, and Scott
relates both her troubled adulthood and the fascinating debates over the
American Plan that continued to roil for decades, both inside and outside
the legal system. 'The Trials of Nina McCall' is a consistently surprising
page-turner, and at times I found myself wishing Stern had lingered over
particular details. He notes that some of the laws that made up the
American
Plan are still on the books today; it's the interpretation of these laws
that has changed, beginning in the 1960s, amid increasing litigation and
evolving sexual mores. What kinds of public mandates are justifiable in
combating contagious disease? Is involuntary quarantine ever acceptable? I
would have welcomed Stern's views on such questions. Even so, his book is a
brilliant study of the way social anxieties have historically congealed in
state control over women's bodies and behavior -- at times with the
complicity of medical authorities. It should come as no surprise, but
appalls nonetheless, to learn that more than one government enforcer of the
American Plan also played a key role in the notorious Tuskegee syphilis
study, in which infected black men were deliberately denied treatment and
left to sicken and die. Unchecked power over those who have little, Stern
warns, is a peril that should keep us on high alert today. Follow New York
Times Books on Facebook and Twitter , sign up for our newsletter or our
literary calendar . And listen to us on the Book Review podcast .. PHOTO: A
poster produced by the federal government in 1940. (PHOTOGRAPH FROM THE
U.S.
NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE).
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