Professional Health Care and the Japanese American Incarceration: An Introduction to the Symposium

Although considerable scholarly attention has been paid to the incarceration of the Japanese Americans during World War II, beginning with Eugene V. Rostow’s courageous article published while the war was still going on, ¹ nothing substantial had been published about the medical treatment provided by the U.S. government to this large group of Americans until very recently. ² While much of the scholarly literature about the camps that began to appear at the end of the 1960s did mention the health problems of the imprisoned people, the discussions were brief and largely anecdotal. ³ Only in the recent past—more than forty years after the last camp closed—have scholars begun to focus on the historical and policy issues involved in providing medical attention to persons who have been called “prisoners without trial.” Much of that small body of literature has been written by the symposium participants. Their contributions here represent both a summary of existing scholarship and a new synthesis from which future scholarship will evolve. ⁴

Each author has chosen a different aspect of camp health care to examine: Louis Fiset looks at the initial care provided in the so-called Assembly Centers, the temporary camps set up in the spring and summer of 1942 under the supervision of the U.S. Public Health Service. Susan Smith looks at female health-care workers—Caucasian, Japanese American, and, eventually, African American—and the services, largely maternal, provided to female inmates in the so-called Relocation Centers, under the auspices of the War Relocation Authority. Gwenn Jensen’s paper, drawn from her newly minted doctoral dissertation, focuses on the health consequences of the relatively long WRA confinement.

Obviously there are common elements in these essays. Each deals with situations in which Caucasian administrators and medical personnel exercised authority over Japanese American medical personnel and patients. In all of the camps there was sustained improvisation with inadequate equipment, a shortage of personnel, and a hostile environment. For most of the Caucasian health-care providers, coming to work in the camps was analogous to moving from what we would call today a First World country to a Third World country—although for some, like Wyoming’s Nurse Kessel, there was personal economic advantage in making the move, and for the few African Americans, it was a breakthrough.

As for the effectiveness of the provided care, our authors give us what seems, at first glance, a split verdict. Fiset, admittedly dealing with somewhat different circumstances than the others, finds “efforts by the Health Service and resident medical staffs . . . heroic.” Smith speaks of camp health care as “a miniature version of what government officials considered the ideal American health-care system at mid-twentieth century,” while noting both the “constructive and destructive” consequences of increased federal authority over the public’s health in wartime. Jensen concludes that “the health-care delivery system was mismanaged and poorly administered, a situation mitigated only by the contribution of detained health-care professionals. . . . While collectively many of the detained had greater access to health care than before the war, . . . the deficits of the system caused deaths and disability that could have been prevented.”

I think that these apparent differences are largely differences of perspective and emphasis, and that the three essays are mutually compatible. I believe that each provides a part of the truth, which, in the final analysis, is about all that a historian can hope to achieve. I also believe, however, that there are ways in which students of the medical care provided in America’s concentration camps can achieve a more common perspective. Each of the papers seeks a standard of comparability, but none really finds one. The camps are, happily, unique in the American experience, but there are other populations of Americans who have received government health care en masse in restricted environments. One thinks of newly built Army camps in the same period, the CCC camps of the depression era, and prisons generally ⁵ —but the most appropriate comparative situation that I can think of is the health care provided to the American Indian...