Searching Eyes ─ Privacy, the State, and Disease Surveillance in America

"This is a stunning book--comprehensive and perceptive. Searching Eyes: Privacy, the State, and Disease Surveillance in America is a major achievement in interdisciplinary scholarship and historical interpretation, and will remain the definitive work on this important subject for many years to come."--Theodore M. Brown, Ph.D., Professor of History, Community and Preventive Medicine, and Medical Humanities, University of Rochester

"A landmark in the history and ethics of public health. Meticulously researched, it provides the first overarching account of the evolution of public health surveillance in the United States, from the debates over tuberculosis and venereal disease at the start of the 20th century to the tensions over AIDS and bioterrorism at century's end. Fairchild, Bayer, and Colgrove provide insights not only into how concerns about privacy shaped the politics of public health but also about how the need for protection and services could fuel the demand for extending surveillance. Searching Eyes is invaluable not only for those who want to understand the past but for those who will be called on to make and debate public health policy in the future."--Larry O. Gostin, author of Public Health Law: Power, Duty, Restraint (2nd ed, forthcoming 2008)

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