Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
living particles, made it easier for anti-contagionism to find a cordial recep-
tion.
11
The first two of four major cholera pandemics in the nineteenth
century won converts to the anti-contagionist cause. Erwin H.Ackerknecht
perceptively argued that anti-contagionists were “motivated by the new
critical scientific spirit of the time,” while contagionists supported old the-
ories that seemed never to have been carefully examined.
12
The emphasis on environment over personal habits of hygiene in Chad-
wick's report set the tone for the strategies to be employed in combating
disease and improving sanitation for much of the remaining century. Per-
haps the earliest graphic example of Chadwick's influence in the United
States was
The Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Population of New York,
an
1845 study published by New York City Inspector John H. Griscom.
The
Sanitary Condition
began as an addendum to Dr. Griscom's first report as
City Inspector. That 1842 document, titled A Brief View of the Sanitary
Condition of the City, included a commentary with particular emphasis on
the state of the poor. New York's aldermen were so displeased with
Griscom's characterization of the city's sanitary condition and with his call
for preventive action that they chose not to reappoint him. Undaunted,
Griscom expanded the commentary into a small topic with a title reminis-
cent of Chadwick's own report.
13
The Sanitary Condition
—the first in-depth study of health problems in
New York—ranged over many topics. It called for the expansion of the
public water supply, the construction of an underground sewer system, and
the development of a program of street cleaning and refuse removal. The
study was infused with the environmental view of disease and was based on
what the historian John Duffy called “the general acceptance of the symbi-
otic relationship between physical and moral health.” Griscom, like Chad-
wick, decried the unnecessary physical evils that were responsible for
widespread sickness and premature deaths among the poorer classes and
that subsequently inspired moral decay. Prevention of disease was his great-
est hope for reversing these ominous trends.
14
Despite the dramatic disclosures, and the reformist momentum provided
by Chadwick and other European sanitarians, little immediately came of
Griscom's efforts. New York was infamous as an extraordinarily unhealthy
city with problems so complex and political webs so entangled that one
report could not change entrenched practices or reverse long-standing
policies of neglect.
15
