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Plague and Fire
MOHR, JAMES C. Plague and Fire: Battling Black Death and the 1900 Burning of Honolulu’s Chinatown. Oxford University Press, 2004. xi, 235pp. ISBN 0-19-516231-5 (hc), $30.00. Index. Illus (b&w). Acid-free.
Historian James C. Mohr’s Plague and Fire tells the story of how Honolulu’s Chinatown was destroyed in a conflagration that started as a series of controlled burns meant to rid the city of the bubonic plague. Throughout his work, Mohr pays close attention to the political and social conditions of the time in order to develop a complete picture of how this disaster came about. Mohr has been a professor in the University of Oregon’s History Department since 1992, and published other medical histories, such as Doctors and the Law: Medical Jurisprudence in Nineteenth-Century America and Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy,1800-1900. He is also the winner of the Throne - Aldrich award, and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
This book’s focus is on the action and motivations of the three doctors, Nathaniel Emerson, Francis Day, and Clifford Wood, the members of Hawaii’s Board of Health who were given absolute control over the government of the islands. Mohr makes a convincing case in defense of these men, arguing that their options for containing the plague were limited by the medical knowledge of the time, and also showing that they actually fought against many of the more racist actions urged by other members of the white power structure. One of the most relevant conclusions that Mohr reaches is that the burning of Chinatown was the result of well-intentioned, but ill-advised, controlled burns that spread uncontrollably, rather than a racially-motivated attack upon the Chinese by the white minority that had just seized control of the islands.
Mohr does a very good job of placing the events surrounding the plague epidemic within the proper historical and social context. The 1890s were an especially turbulent time in Hawaiian history; the Overthrow of the monarchy had occurred in 1893, and, when the epidemic broke out in the islands, the American businessmen who had seized power were trying to get Hawaii annexed into the United States as a territory over the protests of native Hawaiians. Mohr also explains the various social and racial tensions that were prevalent on the islands at this time. Throughout his story of the events that occurred during the epidemic, Mohr points out the ways in which these political upheavals and social tensions affected the decision-making and the fears of the people involved. Thus, the reader is left with a very thorough understanding of why the events of 1900 played out the way that they did.
The only shortcoming that I can see in this book is that Mohr spends so much time developing the social contexts that the aftermath of the epidemic and the fire seems a little short-changed; it is simply not developed as fully as the rest of the book. I would have liked to read more about this, but the treatment may be limited because Mohr felt that it was outside of the scope of his main argument as a medical historian. The book has no bibliography, but endnotes for each chapter are included at the end of the book, and the index is adequate. The book is also peppered with photographs and maps that add another level of understanding to the events covered in the book. The pictures are taken mostly from the Hawaii State Archives, and provide glimpses of the actual fires, as well as the destruction that was left in its wake. Overall, this is a very well written, readable book; I would recommend it for academic libraries and for public libraries with good Hawaiiana collections. Furthermore, the book is so well-written that it could be read by high school students, and so I believe this would also be valuable to a high school library.
Historian James C. Mohr’s Plague and Fire tells the story of how Honolulu’s Chinatown was destroyed in a conflagration that started as a series of controlled burns meant to rid the city of the bubonic plague. Throughout his work, Mohr pays close attention to the political and social conditions of the time in order to develop a complete picture of how this disaster came about. Mohr has been a professor in the University of Oregon’s History Department since 1992, and published other medical histories, such as Doctors and the Law: Medical Jurisprudence in Nineteenth-Century America and Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy,1800-1900. He is also the winner of the Throne - Aldrich award, and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
This book’s focus is on the action and motivations of the three doctors, Nathaniel Emerson, Francis Day, and Clifford Wood, the members of Hawaii’s Board of Health who were given absolute control over the government of the islands. Mohr makes a convincing case in defense of these men, arguing that their options for containing the plague were limited by the medical knowledge of the time, and also showing that they actually fought against many of the more racist actions urged by other members of the white power structure. One of the most relevant conclusions that Mohr reaches is that the burning of Chinatown was the result of well-intentioned, but ill-advised, controlled burns that spread uncontrollably, rather than a racially-motivated attack upon the Chinese by the white minority that had just seized control of the islands.
Mohr does a very good job of placing the events surrounding the plague epidemic within the proper historical and social context. The 1890s were an especially turbulent time in Hawaiian history; the Overthrow of the monarchy had occurred in 1893, and, when the epidemic broke out in the islands, the American businessmen who had seized power were trying to get Hawaii annexed into the United States as a territory over the protests of native Hawaiians. Mohr also explains the various social and racial tensions that were prevalent on the islands at this time. Throughout his story of the events that occurred during the epidemic, Mohr points out the ways in which these political upheavals and social tensions affected the decision-making and the fears of the people involved. Thus, the reader is left with a very thorough understanding of why the events of 1900 played out the way that they did.
The only shortcoming that I can see in this book is that Mohr spends so much time developing the social contexts that the aftermath of the epidemic and the fire seems a little short-changed; it is simply not developed as fully as the rest of the book. I would have liked to read more about this, but the treatment may be limited because Mohr felt that it was outside of the scope of his main argument as a medical historian. The book has no bibliography, but endnotes for each chapter are included at the end of the book, and the index is adequate. The book is also peppered with photographs and maps that add another level of understanding to the events covered in the book. The pictures are taken mostly from the Hawaii State Archives, and provide glimpses of the actual fires, as well as the destruction that was left in its wake. Overall, this is a very well written, readable book; I would recommend it for academic libraries and for public libraries with good Hawaiiana collections. Furthermore, the book is so well-written that it could be read by high school students, and so I believe this would also be valuable to a high school library.
Submitted in May 2006 by Christine Pawliuk, LIS student, University of Hawaii at Manoa
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