March, 2025: Gordon Frierson, MD
Program: ‘Guarding the Golden Gate: The Story of the United States
Quarantine Station on Angel Island’
J. Gordon Frierson, MD is a clinical professor emeritus in the Department of Medicine, University of California San Francisco. After a decades long career in the medical field, Frierson continues his long standing interest in the history of medicine with the publication of Yellow Fever Vaccine: A History in the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine 2010 and Guarding the Golden Gate: The Story of the United States Quarantine Station on Angel Island 2022. He is a member of the Bay Area History of Medicine Society, the American Osler Society and the American Association for the History of Medicine. He also authored 3 chapters in: Cooper, David, ed., Doctors of Another Calling 2013; University of Delaware Press. The chapters are short biographies of Leonard Wood, Sun Yat-sen, and John Harvey Kellogg, all physicians who drifted into non-medical activities. Gordon will be speaking about the U.S. Government Quarantine Station that used to exist on Angel Island (opened in 1891). The station’s function was to quarantine people (largely immigrants) coming to California with diseases such as smallpox, plague, cholera, etc. before they got ashore, at a time when knowledge of how these diseases were spread was still primitive. The talk will cover two plague epidemics in San Francisco, both smallpox outbreaks, and the process of quarantining thousands of people and disinfecting their ships. It is based on his book Guarding the Golden Gate, mentioned above.
. . . by Scott Hiller