Kara Murphy Schlichting, "Summer Complaint: Heat as a Public Health Crisis in 19th-Century New York City"
Abstract: When it came to public health, seasons mattered in nineteenth-century New York City. Extreme heat endangered human health, sickening people with heat stroke and dehydration and spiking the fatality rates of infectious diseases. This paper opens in the 1860s as physicians and sanitarians established a Board of Health, the nation's first, to address urbanites' ill-health, including summertime mortality rates. Miasmic theory's focus on the role of environmental factors led public health offiicials to see summertime through an explanatory frame that focused on environmental conditions of city streets and atmosphere. In studying the city environs, enumerating and charting temperature, humidity, and wind alongside vital statistics, public health officials built an etiology of seasonal ill-health that linked urban form and weather phenomena. I argue taht climatological understanding of healthfulness and disease led health officials to study the city's atmosphere and attempt to improve the housing conditions of airless tenements and the sanitation issues of filthy streets. Public health struggled to understand and mitigate summertime deaths through successive reforms concerning street cleaning, housing improvements, and the slow shift from miasma to germ theory.
Comment: Richard C. Keller, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health
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