James Colgrove, PhD, MPH, is an associate professor in the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. His research examines the relationship between individual rights and the collective well-being and the social, political, and legal processes through which public health policies have been mediated in American history. His most recent book is Epidemic City: The Politics of Public Health in New York (Russell Sage Foundation, 2011). He is also the author of State of Immunity: The Politics of Vaccination in Twentieth-Century America (University of California Press, 2006); co-author, with Amy Fairchild and Ronald Bayer, of Searching Eyes: Privacy, the State, and Disease Surveillance in America (University of California Press, 2007); and co-editor, with David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, of The Contested Boundaries of American Public Health (Rutgers University Press, 2008). His articles have been published in the New England Journal of Medicine, American Journal of Public Health, Science, Health Affairs, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, and the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics. His research has been supported by grants from the National Library of Medicine, the Greenwall Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Milbank Memorial Fund.