ABSTRACT
Historians of medicine in the United States have recognized how ideas about race condition the terms of public health. I want to question a key word in the history of U.S. race relations, ‘segregation,’ to explore how ideas about public health have conditioned the political terms of race. 2 I focus on a semantic shift, in the late 1890s, that has been duly noted but not well explained by historians of race relations. 3 Prevailing usage regarding racial policy began to change, near the turn of the century, from ‘separation of the races’ to simply ‘segregation.’ It is my argument that this salient semantic shift not only may be explained by referring to the medical history of the period, but that this explanation deepens our understanding of both the continuities and the discontinuities between racial slavery in the nineteenth century and racial segregation in the twentieth (Woodward, 1974). This essay explores how invidious assumptions about race persisted in medical discourse even as the hereditarian understanding tuberculosis was revised in light of germ theory. This entailed a metaphoric translation from an older vocabulary of ‘race’ inscribed in ‘blood,’ to a newer one of ‘germs’ figured in saliva. 4 It entailed another translation between the specialized vocabulary of medicine and the larger political language in which medicine is always situated, the two being contexts for one another. 5
