The war against hepatitis B: a history of the International Task Force on Hepatitis B Immunization

of epidemic disease in New York City from 1800 to the present. Elizabeth Blackmar, in a summary of her broader study of New York housing, Manhattan for rent, 1785-1850, discusses the unique relationship between the urban housing market and public health. Alan Kraut reprises elements of his recent book, Silent travelers: germs, genes and the immigrant menace, in an essay on immigrants, nativism and public health in New York City during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The book's second section, 'When epidemic strikes', focuses on three epidemic diseases of the twentieth century as experienced by New Yorkers, smallpox, poliomyelitis, and HIV/AIDS, with essays by Judith Walzer Leavitt, Naomi Rogers, and Ronald Bayer, respectively. The essays on polio and AIDS are drawn from book-length studies by Rogers (Dirt and disease: polio before FDR) and Bayer (Private acts, social consequences: AIDS and the politics ofpublic health). The final section, 'The city responds', discusses how New Yorkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries responded to the threat and reality of epidemic disease. Elizabeth Fee and Evelynn Hammonds remind us, once again, that a public health official of the turn of the century, such as Dr Hermann M Biggs, had to be as adept in politics and social discourse as he was in more scientific endeavours. Daniel Fox, in an essay on the politics of public health in New York City since 1920, describes how the domains of municipal and public health politics became separate entities over this period. Hives ofsickness succeeds in summarizing some of the current historical research on the social construction of epidemic disease within the context of New York City. It is an example of how public health crises may be studied in order to accomplish a more nuanced understanding of the cultural, religious, political, social, and economic histories of cities.