Searching Eyes: Privacy, the State, and Disease Surveillance in America (California/Milbank Books on Health and the Public)

California/Milbank Books on Health and the Public

by Amy L. Fairchild, Ronald Bayer, James Colgrove

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.

Genres: Nonfiction

368 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd give this book 6 stars if I could! This is a dense but incredibly well-written history of the tension between privacy and public health surveillance initiatives. The text first introduces two concepts of privacy-- paternalistic and democratic-- and then charts how public health (slowly) adapted to a democratic conception of privacy after the social movements of the 1960s. Fairchild and her co-authors do a great job underscoring just how complex the relationship between the right to privacy and the imperative of public health surveillance and intervention. Instead of suggesting that one or the other is more important, the authors celebrate this tension as productive.

I strongly suggest this book to any public health professionals, MPH students, historians of medicine, or legal scholars. Although the text emphasizes legal and professional history, even social historians will find items of use in this book.

[Elizabeth]

As heard in the Berman Institute of Bioethics seminar series.