| "Fevered Measures" examines legal and medical tensions on the Texas-Mexican border that accompanied communicable disease outbreaks during an age of heightened labor mobility and state formation. The dissertation argues that the measures taken to resolve these tensions shaped new legal, cultural and geographic boundaries among individuals and communities in the post-Reconstruction United States.;Early in the aftermath of Reconstruction, USPHS officers implemented a national framework for their communicable disease prevention efforts in their responses to smallpox, yellow fever and typhus outbreaks. This region led and maintained the American consensus approach to communicable disease prevention. This consensus was evident in large-scale experiments in boundary creation like the 1882 Texas-Mexican yellow fever epidemic and contributed to the complicated 1895 Camp Jenner experiment in smallpox serum. The USPHS used this national framework to draw medical boundaries between Mexico and the United States in south-central Texas and northern Mexico. This process of modifying familiar labels and practices to fit the unfamiliar landscapes of the Texas-Mexico border built ambiguities into the definition of communicable disease. These shifting medical boundaries, familiar labels, increased political authority and ambiguous disease practices framed regional conflicts over the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of communicable disease.;The impunity USPHS officers often enjoyed placed them in tension with other residents who may have shared their outlook on communicable disease and citizenship. This dissertation uses diplomatic records, public health records, press accounts, congressional records and manuscript sources to analyze the process of disease definition and community formation. Long-term residents, black expatriates, Mexican sojourners and religious dissenters articulated common-law principles of bodily autonomy and due process against forcible re-vaccination and other newly intrusive public health practices. The erosion of local democratic participation, an increased popular faith in professional authority, the stricter policing of racial and national boundaries and changes in constitutional law exemplified by Plessy v. Ferguson, Lochner v. New York and Buck v. Bell restricted the scope and reception of these rights-claiming practices. These unsuccessful claims expose often hidden conflicts among federal authorities and politically marginal communities over the relationship between the realms of communicable disease and citizenship in the Progressive Era. |
