“White Plague, Yellow Peril: Tuberculosis and Environmental Health in San Francisco Chinatown”

To participate, join the email list here.

Once known colloquially as the “White Plague” due to the pallor of its victims, tuberculosis was historically prevalent in San Francisco Chinatown. By the 1910s, the combination of racial segregation and poverty meant that an inhabitant of Chinatown was three and a half times more likely to die from the lung infection than any other San Franciscan. That difference persisted even as rates of infection in Chinatown fell to the same levels as other parts of the city after the 1920s and the first free screening clinic opened in the neighborhood in 1934. Until 1970, the Chinese in Chinatown remained the most undertreated population in San Francisco and the principal source for new cases in the city. For more than a century, then, tuberculosis was part of everyday life in San Francisco Chinatown. This talk will describe how Chinatown residents and community health activists combatted the paired menace of the “White Plague” and “Yellow Peril.”