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Howard Markel, MD, PhD; Lawrence O. Gostin, JD

JAMA. 2008;300(2):209-211.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Newspaper headlines and television reports are disturbing and mind-numbing: Hurricane Katrina, the Asian tsunami, the Myanmar cyclone, earthquakes in China, genocide in Darfur. A unifying theme of these tragedies is how often they are met by shrugged shoulders, glazed eyes, or complete indifference, proof positive of the aphorism "one half of the world knows not how the other lives."

How the Other Half Lives

Although Rabelais¹ coined this adage in 1532, Jacob A. Riis made it a household expression in his 1890 magnum opus, How the Other Half Lives,² in which he exposed the horrible living conditions of New York City's Lower East Side, one of the most crowded areas in the world and most famous immigrant ghettos in human history. With more than 523 inhabitants per acre, this neighborhood of less than 1 square mile of tenements and poverty was largely ignored by other New . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Author Affiliations: University of Michigan, Center for the History of Medicine, Ann Arbor (Dr Markel); and O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, DC (Mr Gostin).