Risse, who counts the William H. Welch Medal (1988) and Lifetime Achievement Award (2005) from the American Association for the History of Medicine among his many accolades, again focuses his analytical eye on late nineteenth/early twentieth century San Francisco to examine the mix of “psychological, ideological and pragmatic reasons” for isolating the sick from the well which lays at the “junction of biology, culture, politics, race, and nativism.”1 Part of the University of Illinois Press’ new series on the role of emotion in history, the book is comprised of two parts loosely joined together.