Building the Worlds That Kill Us: Disease, Death, and Inequality in American History

Rosner and Markowitz (Lead Wars)—history professors at Columbia University and John Jay College, respectively—present a disquieting examination of how socioeconomic status has determined who gets sick throughout American history. Beginning in the colonial era, Rosner and Markowitz discuss how European settlers penned Native Americans into ever smaller areas and separated them from traditional hunting grounds, causing widespread malnutrition that compromised Indigenous peoples’ ability to fight off diseases brought by colonists. Elsewhere, the authors discuss how in the mid-1800s, impoverished young women employed in matchstick factories developed “phossy jaw” (a deadly disease in which the jaw gradually dissolves, “leaving its victims disfigured and unable to eat”) from working with phosphorous; how in the 1930s, a mining company knowingly exposed miners to dangerous levels of silica hoping the men would move on from the company before they succumbed to lung disease (silica concentrations were so high the miners developed symptoms after mere months, instead of the usual years); and how Monsanto sold polychlorinated biphenyls, used in electrical insulation and pesticides, well into the 1970s despite knowing for decades that the potent toxins were leeching into food and water sources. The complex, occasionally enraging history reveals how apparently indiscriminate afflictions are fundamentally shaped by socioeconomic forces. This hard-hitting exposé will change how readers think about the nature of disease. (Oct.)