The Heberden Society presents John A. Gutiérrez, PhD

“Roaming Around the City:” Tuberculosis, Puerto Ricans, and the Politics of Disease in 20th Century New York City

Please join the Heberden Society on Wednesday, November 12, 2025 at 1 PM EST for "Roaming Around the City:” Tuberculosis, Puerto Ricans, and the Politics of Disease in 20th Century New York City."

In the fall of 1950, the New York State Tuberculosis and Health Association found that cases of tuberculosis among Puerto Ricans in Manhattan had increased 181 percent over the previous five years. The increase was attributed by New York City health officials to “overcrowding, substandard living conditions and extreme poverty.” The results of the study were startling but not surprising. Indeed, the persistence of the disease among Puerto Ricans was a subject of substantial debate among public health and civic leaders at a moment when the disease had been largely controlled in the city’s non-Puerto Rican white communities. For the next twenty years, the stubborn rates of tuberculosis infection among Puerto Rican New Yorkers not only framed the community as a dangerous vector of infection but also offered the city’s medico-political elites a focal point for the debating proper role of the city in combatting the disease.

Drawing extensively from the records of the New York City Department of Health, this presentation integrates Puerto Ricans into the historiography on tuberculosis in New York City and traces the ways in which civic and public health leaders in the City came to understand the connection between disease spread and persistence within the Puerto Rican community and the ways in which they responded (and failed to respond).

John A. Gutiérrez is an Assistant Professor and Chair of the Department of Latin American and Latinx Studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice/CUNY. His research focuses on the history of health, medicine, and disease in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and its diasporas in the United States.

This is a hybrid lecture, co-sponsored by the David Rogers Health Policy Colloquium. Onsite attendance is available in the Belfer Research Building (413 East 69th Street), 2nd Floor, Rooms B & C. Virtual attendance is available on Zoom (passcode 844704).