“Public Health is,” C.-E. A. Winslow defined in 1920, “the science and the art of preventing disease, prolonging life, and promoting physical health and efficiency through organized community efforts.” In this definition, the term efficiency means vitality or vigor, on the meaning of which human engineering as a labor reform idea cast a deep shadow. Nevertheless, this fact has not been previously pointed out. Because the nature and meaning of human engineering changed entirely, the path to trace the relationship with the definition disappeared. This paper aims to rebuild this forgotten link and extend our understanding of the definition.

According to its originator, Dr. Winthrop Talbot, human engineering was a new profession applying science to improving labor conditions. He advised employers to organize a Department of Human Engineering to promote the efficiency of working people as the human machine, proper maintenance and repair being indispensable to bring out the original capability. He used the physiological terms as a marketing technique to express a cold-hearted attitude towards benevolence or philanthropy and make employers willingly purchase progressive labor policies. He received a definite meaning of efficiency, “the ratio of the useful result produced to the effort utilized in producing it.” Therefore, efficiency means a performance ratio of the human machine.

Winslow earnestly accepted Talbot’s idea and devoted himself to the human engineering movement because he had been interested in occupational disease and physical disorders due to “the faulty operation of the human machine.” He penned an article, “Fresh Air as a Speed Boss,” in a management-reform journal to rewrite Frederic W. Taylor’s concept of efficiency and alter the principles of scientific management. He insisted on the economies of installing ventilation facilities to increase the health and efficiency (vigor) of the human machine.

During World War I, Winslow’s vision became practical. The personnel management movement took place, and certain industrial corporations introduced intelligent measures to safeguard workers’ health. Furthermore, war machinery accepted the question of industrial over-fatigue as one of the corporations in-house and as the nation’s health.

In 1920, Winslow wrote down the definition of public health based on his experience and practices in the human engineering and personnel management movements. He formulated it in generic terms, but it was clear that he placed efficiency as the ratio of the vitality and vigor of the human machine to organized community efforts for improving the working environment.

Since the progressive period has gone away, the influence of human engineering on the definition has become invisible. A fatal change has occurred in human engineering and human machine meanings, once symbolizing labor policies of the excellent companies, now indicating totalitarianism and dictatorship. When we forgot the original connotations of these words, every route was closed to understanding the link between human engineering and the definition.

The Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health was founded in 1916 on the recommendation of the Welch-Rose report submitted to the Rockefeller Foundation International Health Board (IHB) to modernize public health education. This research-oriented graduate school not only generated notable scientists but also became a model for other universities; however, it did not directly contribute to the improvement of rural health. Wickliffe Rose, one of the contributors to the report, had had a vision to train personnel as public health officers for rural areas who would supervise and educate people to improve rural health. Rose did not promote his idea in the Welch-Rose report due to the IHB’s bias against him, but his vision was passed on to John A. Ferrell, an IHB director who strongly believed that every county must have a health board with a skilled public health officer. In the early 1920s, Ferrell launched a campaign in rural counties and secured budgets from the IHB to support local health boards and to induce public health students to apply for internships. Counties and towns were experiencing a growing need for public health personnel, but many of them could not employ a health officer because of budget shortfalls. Graduates from best schools were not attracted to such underpaid and unstable jobs with slim future prospects. Meanwhile, public health nurses and school nurses filled the role of local health workers and educated families on personal hygiene, nutrition, and childcare, paving the way for more organized community health institutions. The presence of nurses in the southern and western mountain areas encouraged women to enter medicine but marginalized public health work. To Ferrell, rural counties still needed a health officer to administer broad health-work with the local government, the courts, physicians, and civic organizations—a role nurses would be unable to fill. The Social Security Act of 1935 provided federal subsidies for rural public health work; however, a discrepancy between the counties’ requirement of field-based health workers and the scientific training of specialists promoted by the IHB continued to shape the rural public health structure until the 1950s.

This essay examines the colonial politics of humanitarianism in the Asia Pacific through an analysis of the public health programs of the American Red Cross in the Philippine Islands. In the aftermath of World War I, the Philippines Chapter of the American Red Cross launched massive campaigns for the improvement of health and hygiene conditions in the archipelago. Throughout the 1920s, the Chapter endeavored to extend its humanitarian assistance in public health all over the colonial territory. With its more than a million indigenous members, the Chapter grew up to be the largest humanitarian organization in the Asia Pacific, second only to the Japanese Red Cross. Yet, behind the spectacular development of the Red Cross organization lay conflicting relationships among various groups with different political and economic interests in colonial society. Coercion, resistance, and rivalry between colonizers and the colonized as well as between urban elites and the rural poor characterized the humanitarian assistance in the colonial settings. American officials of the Chapter claimed their public health activities as a civilizing mission to uplift the standards of health and hygiene in the Asian islands. The rapid progress of Filipinization in its staff and organization, however, made it practically difficult for these Americans to implement coercive measures to intervene into public health problems against the will of native people. Whereas Filipino political elites attempted to appropriate the Red Cross enterprises for the independence movement, the rural poor used, and sometimes resisted, the public health programs for their own ends. At the intersection of colonial rule and nation building, the Red Cross projects of public health became the site of contestation among different social groups in the colonial territory. By focusing on the close entanglement of colonial rule, nation building, and public health, this essay illuminates the ideological politics of the Red Cross humanitarianism in colonial society from transnational perspectives.

Critics have continually been baffled by Jack London’s contradictory representations of racial problems. Occasionally, he unabashedly exhibited his position as a white supremacist, but in some of his writings, he suddenly displayed heartful sympathy toward non-white races, especially those oppressed by Western imperial domination. The aim of this paper is to highlight his racial attitude, which was greatly influenced by his observation of the lepers he encountered in Hawaii during his round-the-world-cruise on the Snark.

Leprosy and its trope seem to have fascinated London, especially after his visit to Molokai; a place where Hawaiian lepers were segregated and treated by a US government medical facility. While London wrote many essays and stories about leprosy following this visit, my great interest in these texts lies in his contradictions about the disease. Following his visit to Molokai, his first reference to the disease was in an essay titled “The Lepers of Molokai,” in which he insisted “that the horrors of Molokai, as they have been painted in the past, do not exist.” However, his subsequent short stories about leprosy in Hawaii convey a contradictory statement: Molokai is portrayed as “the horror” that separates lepers from their families and confines them for life. This paper contends that this is not a result of a mindset change in London, but a symptom of inner conflict between his perception and the reality of the disease. Under the contemporary influence of Social Darwinism, he considered the white race as immune to leprosy because it had undergone natural selection to become the fittest. However, undeniable evidence of whites who had contracted leprosy haunted London so persistently, that he could not ignore the possibility of contracting the disease. Thus, he fought against the leprosy tropes that unnecessarily condemned the infected.

Following the Hawaiian experience, London became haunted by the possibility of contracting leprosy, which strongly influenced his writing. The Scarlet Plague was written shortly after he abandoned the cruise with the Snark, because he believed he had contracted what he at the time believed to be leprosy, but later turned out to be just psoriasis. This short novel describes the strong tropes from ancient times concerning leprosy as defective. The narrator, Professor Smith, who accepts those tropes without question, believing that the disease is meted out to lower-class people as a punishment for their immoral and violent behavior, but in truth, the disease attacks indiscriminately, disregarding class hierarchy. London perhaps knew about the indiscriminate nature of the disease very well; however, he could not escape from this widely accepted punitive trope. Thus, he inevitably retained the differentiation between a white and a non-white, or a dominant and a submissive person. This unresolved tension led to ambiguity and contradiction in his writings about race and disease.

In the time of COVID-19, we become more sensitive to the signifier of “masque” as represented by the works of major American Renaissance writers such as: Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”(1842), Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Howe’s Masquerade”(1838) and Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man: His Masquerade(1857). Although these texts do not refer to actual pestilences prevalent in the Antebellum period, they cannot help but remind us of the contagious history of smallpox, yellow fever and Cholera from the 17^th century through the mid-19^th century. To put it another way, it is contagion that keeps empowering itself through its catachrestic signification.

From this perspective, this paper attempts to reveal how American history has revolutionized the discourse of illness by examining texts from the colonial era through the postmodern age. The first chapter discusses Thomas Harriot’s A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia(1588), which considers plagues like smallpox as the “invisible bullets” and endorses the idea that “God protects his chosen people by killing off untrustworthy Indians”(Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 36). By the same token, however, it is also true that despite his orthodox religious faith, Harriot was rumored to be atheist, simply because he was a typical Renaissance man equipped with the proto-modern but miraculously encyclopedic knowledge of mathematics, cartography, optics, and navigational science. As Christopher Marlowe pointed out, Harriot followed In the footsteps of Moses as a juggler. Therefore, the second chapter argues that Ishmael Reed’s postmodern metafiction Mumbo Jumbo(1971), which features an imaginary anti-plague “Jes Grew” and redefines Moses not only as a sorcerer but also as the prophet of Voodoo Jazz, could well be interpreted as an African American critique of European logocentric colonialism.

The third chapter examines Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn or, Memoirs of the Year 1793(1799–1800), the archetype of American pandemic fiction featuring the yellow fever that conquered Philadelphia in 1793. What with John Edgar Wideman’s postmodern novel like Philadelphia Fire(1990) and what with Samuel Otter’s comprehensive study Philadelphia Stories(2010), Arthur Mervyn is reconfigured now as a postcolonial Gothic Romance ending up with an interracial marriage between the Scottish American protagonist and the Jewish Portuguese woman Achsa Fielding described as “unsightly as a night-hag, tawney as a Moor, the eye of a gypsey”(Arthur Mervyn, 230).

The fourth chapter starts with a reading of Sakyo Komatsu’s pandemic novel Virus: The Day of Resurrection(1964), which dramatizes the way a deadly bioweapon, MM-88, based on microbes collected by satellites in outer space in 1963 and 1964, paves the way for not only a world-wide epidemic initially known as the “Tibetan Flu” but also the total nuclear war. This novel gave transpacific impacts upon the post-apocalyptic imagination of Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain(1969) and Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao(2007), the hero of which, characterized as a typical nerd, convinces us of the rhetorical distinction between xenophobia and xenophilia at stake in the time of pandemic.

The consensus among literary historians is that the eruption of yellow fever in 1789 Philadelphia significantly influenced the authorship formation of Charles Brockden Brown, “the father of the American novel.” In contrast, no critical attempt has been made to assess the role such epidemics played in the career of James Fenimore Cooper, who presumably might have contracted the fever during the 1822 outbreak in New York. The epidemic, both as setting and plot-device, is virtually absent on the surface texture of Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales. This article is an attempt to reclaim the traces of the epidemic embedded beneath the texts by reading the romances as Cooper’s own medical chart and to intertwine Natty Bumpoo’s heroic feats with the medical discourses of the antebellum period.

Letter VIII of Notions of the Americans, Cooper’s fictional collection of letters, contains an extensive report on the yellow fever outbreaks in 1819 and 1822, in which the fictive letter-writer delineates the ongoing controversy over the etiology of the communicative disease. Contagionists asserted that the disease was spread by close contact with infected people and objects, and that quarantine would be the most effective preventive measure; anticontagionists suggested that there were multiple factors leading to the epidemic, including an unhealthy environment and predisposing personal factors, and that efforts to prevent the causes of disease, both environmental and individual, were called for. This fictional letter aptly summarizes Cooper’s tactic for self-care. Cooper, who was chronically suffering from a “bilious attack,” maintained two-pronged self-therapeutic measures for overcoming the aftereffects of yellow fever: self-isolation from infectious sources on the one hand, and maintenance of the physiological system on the other. Each of these preventive measures will be incorporated into the geographical imaginary of Cooper’s adventure romances as Natty’s modes of positioning in relation to the threatening outer world.

The postures of isolation dominate in The Pioneers, the first of the tales written during the outbreak. The narrative structure of the romance is multi-layered in the sense that the main plot of the Effingham-Temple feud over the property right is entangled with the corporeal subplot of how an injured and diseased body should be cared for. Natty as the “locum tenence,” both a legal procurator and a proxy doctor, cares for and isolates the Effingham inheritance from the contagious greed of the Templeton people. In The Deerslayer, the last of the tales written eighteen years later, the image of the body secluded from without is taken over by the one of the body opened toward the outer environment. By the mid-century the focus of medical discourse had shifted to the gaze into the nervous system, which was supposed to be open and vulnerable to the outer environment. This shift in the medical discourse is dramatized in the scene of Natty’s trial by the Iroquois, in which Natty’s “steadiness of nerve” is tried under the Iroquois leader’s clinical gaze to examine “what his own body is really made of.” Thus the transition of the antebellum medical discourses from contagionism to anticontagionism is inscribed in the first and the last of the Leatherstocking tales.

This article focuses on Emily Greene Balch (1867–1961), one of the most prominent American figures in the women’s international peace movements in the early twentieth century. Balch was a researcher and educator in economics and sociology at a women’s college as well as an activist in social reform and peace movements. She made suggestions about immigration, U.S. democracy, and foreign policies. During WWI, she helped organize the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace (later renamed the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom). The article investigates Balch’s social, academic, and peace activities besides examining her ideas on race, nation, and international peace building in the context of changing U.S. foreign policies and socio-politics.

The social reform movements in the U.S. influenced the development of the women’s peace movement. Some recent studies criticize that such movements were associated with U.S. nationalism, which aimed to achieve a hegemonic position of the nation in international politics and economy. For one reason, mainly white middle-class American women who strongly believed in progressivism and American democracy led these movements. However, other studies claim that feminism unified women of various racial, national, or ethnic backgrounds in the public sphere. Researching Balch may help understand the development of the American women’s peace movement with emerging international networks of women as well as the influence of U.S. politics and national discourses. Nevertheless, studies focusing on Balch have been scarce, especially those on her activities before and during WWI.

The research reveals that Balch’s social and political thoughts reflected progressive social reformative ideas among middle-class women, which emphasized the role of women in protecting society and defending democracy. Balch studied Slavic immigrants in the U.S. and proposed a biological but also socio-cultural concept of “nationality” as a useful framework to categorize people. She did not see “nationality” negatively. Instead, she saw it as a crucial element in the assimilation of immigrants into U.S. society while maintaining their own culture and communities. Balch’s ideas on “race” and “nation” in her early peace movement were also associated with her concept of “nationality”. Balch considered that “peoples” in and from Europe could be unified as one civilized “European” group. She claimed that the U.S. should stabilize the region and maintain international peace, and American women should work for it.

Contrarily, Balch persistently opposed the U.S. entering the war and placed importance on cultural pluralism and the international cooperation of all nations. It was partially attributed to Balch’s political and social activities based on the cooperation with various women activists in North America, Europe, and eventually many other parts of the world. Thus, it can be argued that Balch’s peace movement was influenced by U.S. nationalism but also developed through the growing diversity of women’s netwoks and her ongoing empirical social science research, which enabled her to claim the equality of all nations and nationalities while questioning U.S. democracy and nationalism.

Ralph Adams Cram was a prolific American architect and a devoted Anglo-Catholic in the Episcopal Church. In the late nineteenth century, Cram was among the youth who suffered from the weightlessness of life in Nietzschean term. Cram converted from Unitarian to Episcopalian in his mid-twenties and set out on the endeavor to restore the meaning of life through his church architecture based on the teachings of Anglo Catholicism.

Anglo Catholicism was an outgrowth movement of the Oxford movement in England and spread among Episcopalians in the U.S. during and after the Civil War. It placed emphasis on Catholic heritage rather than the Anglican communion and was closely associated medievalism of the day. Cram, as a rising ecclesiastical architect, tried to transplant the fifteenth-century English-Gothic-style church architecture in the U.S., whose development was, in his view, forcibly cut short by the Reformation. Through his writings, moreover, Cram engaged in a sharp rebuke of individualism, which he saw as coming from Protestantism and as shaping U.S. capitalism and imperialism in his day. Cram advocated the restoration of medieval organic communities and the unity of people based on social justice and equality.

This paper argues that Cram sought to recover the existentialism of life in an era when expressions of human diversity, including sexuality, were suppressed in the standardized middle-class norms of Protestantism that had spread through a variety of progressive social reforms. It also claims that the Cram’s attempt was to create a sort of communes for people to take refuge from ever-expanding and encroaching ‘biopower’ in the Progressive era America.