Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
temperatures that killed bacteria and viruses arrived so late in the autumn.
Nevertheless, fighting epidemics often was not successful, especially since
an understanding of contagion was so primitive.
7
Yellow fever, unlike cholera, spared blacks more than whites. People of
West African extraction suffered least. In the great yellow fever epidemic of
1878, only 183 of 4,046 victims in New Orleans were black, even though
one-third of the city's population was black. In Memphis, where at least
14,000 of the 20,000 people remaining in the city through the epidemic
were black, only 946 of the more than 5,000 yellow fever deaths in the city
came from the “colored population.”
8
Anti-contagionism was eventually discredited, but its widespread adop-
tion in the nineteenth century was a victory for empiricism and rational-
ism over sermonizing and moral outrage. Environmental sanitation
appealed to simple logic and to the senses, offering a way for people to par-
ticipate directly in cleaning the cities, and ostensibly to eradicate disease.
That it misrepresented the root cause of disease was a serious (sometimes
fatal) flaw, but its call for the removal and disposal of waste materials was a
worthy objective.
In the wake of England's sanitary idea and Chadwick's report, the mias-
matic theory of disease “emerged into practical vitality” during the 1850s.
Based on empirical observation of the relation between filth and disease,
the theory at first was somewhat crude, inferring that organic decomposi-
tion
per se
caused disease—i.e., that no specific relationship existed between
a particular kind of decomposing substance and a particular infirmity. Even-
tually filth was recognized as the medium for transmitting disease instead of
the primary source of contagion.This perspective provided a bridge to the
eventual acceptance of the germ, or bacteriological, theory.
9
Although the germ theory was not firmly established until after 1880, in
one form or another the idea of contagion had been circulating since the
sixteenth century or earlier. It was, however, incorrect in detail until Louis
Pasteur and Robert Koch clearly linked a specific organism with a specific
disease. In 1871, an advocate of the germ theory was severely criticized in
Scientific American
for postulating that yellow fever was caused by a living
organism. Only a few years later, during the epidemics of 1878 and 1879,
the belief that a germ caused yellow fever was more widely accepted.
10
Controversy over contagionism in the middle of the nineteenth century,
especially the competition among theories dealing with the generation of
