Book Review: Black Death at the Golden Gate: The Race to Save America from Bubonic Plague (2019). David K. Randall.

This is an interesting social history about the appearance of Bubonic plague in California at the end of the 19th century, which was the last major appearance of the plague on the North American continent.

The narrative covers the careers of the two successive key figures in the nascent U.S. Public Health Service who tried to track down and fight the spread of the plague, particularly in the oppressed and socially isolated Chinese immigrant community in San Francisco.

In the process, Randall describes the complex set of factors, including poverty, terrible tenement housing conditions in Chinatown, an out-of-control rat population, international trade pressures and local racism which had to be understood and overcome in order to put an end to the last major plague outbreak in America.

This book is an excellent piece of social history, weaving together a rich mixture of people and populations, racist movements, the science and development of modern epidemiology and public health, crime, “great man” biography and San Francisco local politics at an early stage of the city’s rise. Highly recommended.