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.

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.

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 Occupational Disease
5. The Right to Be Counted: Confronting the "Menace of Cancer"
6. Who Shall Count the Little Children? From "Crippled Kiddies" to Birth Defects

PART III. SURVEILLANCE AT CENTURY’S END: THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRATIC PRIVACY
7. AIDS, Activism, and the Vicissitudes of Democratic Privacy
8. Counting All Kids: Immunization Registries and the Privacy of Parents and Children
9. Panoptic Visions and Stubborn Realities in a New Era of Privacy

Conclusion: An Enduring Tension
Notes
Index