In this cartoon, Boss Tweed welcomes cholera—a skeletal figure of death carrying a handbag from "Asia"—into the rat-infested and filthy slums of New York. Fear of cholera and other diseases led to the creation of powerful public bodies, relatively free from political interference, to promote sanitation and clean water.
Urbanization during the nineteenth century contributed to the modernization of the nation, but it also brought an ancient disease to the United States: cholera. Cholera did not kill as many people as malaria or tuberculosis, but it was probably the most terrifying disease of the century. Cholera was new to the United States, and its symptoms were gruesome. People were stricken, sometimes in mid-stride, with severe abdominal cramps.
Unremitting diarrhea followed, often culminating in dehydration and kidney failure. About half of those who contracted the disease died.
The disease had centuries earlier originated on the overcrowded banks of the Ganges River in India. In early 1831 the disease appeared in eastern Europe and moved steadily westward.
In January 1832 it surfaced in England. Health officials in the United States then braced for an onslaught.
In June an outbreak of cholera in Montreal prompted wealthy New Yorkers to flee. On June 26 cases appeared in New York City. Soon afterward the disease spread westward along the Erie Canal and then into cities in the Great Lakes region and along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Simultaneously it struck Charleston, South Carolina, and New Orleans, Louisiana.
During the next fifty years cholera outbreaks were fairly common during summer. In 1849 and 1866 it swept through the nation, taking tens of thousands of lives. Most people believed that cholera spread directly from one person to another by bodily contact. When it hit a city, neighboring communities would close the roads and governors called out militias to keep infected persons away. Because cholera outbreaks often appeared first in impoverished tenement districts, immigrants were often blamed for the disease.
But after a cholera epidemic killed nearly 14,000 people in London in 1849,John Snow, a physician, determined that most of those who contracted cholera drew their drinking water from the lower Thames River; people served by an upriver pumping station rarely fell ill from the disease. Snow concluded that infected people with diarrhea passed a "poi-son"into the Thames, which people downriver ingested. (In 1883 Robert Koch identified Snow's "poison": it was a comma-shaped bacterium.)
Physicians, meanwhile, struggled to treat the disease. Some prescribed opium or whiskey, others chloroform or strychnine. One physician claimed that a sick patient rallied after drinking four or five glasses of champagne. Scholars doubt that any treatment did much good. Prevention was the only way to fight cholera.
In 1866, in response to another cholera outbreak,
New York City established a Metropolitan Board of Health to clean up cisterns and garbage. The success of these measures prompted the city to build an extensive network of aqueducts to bring clean water from distant reservoirs and watersheds. The city's clean water became one of its main assets.
Elsewhere, the situation was less encouraging. In February 1873 cholera hit New Orleans and spread up the Mississippi River, ravaging low-lying urban areas where drinking water had been contaminated with sewage.
Nashville was one such city. The city's pumping station was originally located upriver, far to the east of the city. But
Route of cholera, 1832 General trend of the route of cholera, 1873
The Routes of Cholera, 1832, 1873 In 1832, cholera initially spread inland from port cities—New York, Charleston, and New Orleans; in 1873, cholera spread down the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys.
As the city rapidly filled out a forty-block region east of city hall and the state capitol, sewage seeped into the Cumberland River above the pumping station. In 1873 a cholera epidemic swept through the area. The prison was especially hard hit. The Capitol Hill district, on high ground to the west of Brown's Creek, had few cholera cases. In all, 647 people from Nashville died of cholera that summer.
Question for Discussion
¦ At the time, many people chafed at the broad new powers and the higher taxes that city governments claimed in order to address health problems. What arguments can be derived both in support of those expanded powers and against them?
The Cholera Epidemic in Nashville, 1873 Most cholera cases in Nashville were in low-lying ; where sewage seeped into water supplies.
On Sundays in the late nineteenth century, city people crowded into streetcars and headed to the countryside. Enticed by this taste of bucolic splendor, many chose to live in the suburbs and take the streetcars to work downtown. Soon, the population density of the suburbs resembled that of the cities.
The unhealthiness of the tenements was notorious. No one knows exactly, but as late as 1900 about three-quarters of the residents of New York City’s Lower East Side lacked indoor toilets and had to use backyard outhouses to relieve themselves. One noxious corner became known as the “lung block” because of the prevalence of tuberculosis among its inhabitants. In 1900 three out of five babies born in one poor district of Chicago died before their first birthday.
Slums bred criminals—the wonder was that they did not breed more. They also drove well-to-do residents into exclusive sections and to the suburbs. From Boston’s Beacon Hill and Back Bay to San Francisco’s Nob Hill, the rich retired into their cluttered mansions and ignored conditions in the poorer parts of town.
View the Image New York City Tenements at Www. myhistorylab. com
World History
