New York Challenged – The City’s Response to Crisis and Change from Colonial Times to Present

Document I - Dr. John Griscom, Annual Report of the Interments in the City and County of New-York, for the year 1842, with remarks thereon, and a brief view of the Sanitary Condition of the City. This report would be reprinted in 1845 as a booklet entitled Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Population of New York.

Dr. John H. Griscom was an exemplar of the new public health professional of the mid-century. As a founding member of both the New York Medical and Surgical Society and the New York Academy of Medicine, he was at the forefront of the movement to establish and maintain professional standards for medicine. At the same time, his background in Quakerism sustained an intense pietism that directed his interest in medicine, as well as his influence in the profession, toward public health reform, leading him to establish a Committee on Public Health at the Academy of Medicine which would include all of the future leading lights of public health reform for the next twenty years. In 1842 Dr. Griscom became New York’s City Inspector. For Griscom it became a platform from which he began a thirty year crusade to shift the slum debate from the realm of individual morals and merchant concerns onto the ground of public health and sanitary reform.

The over-crowded state of many tenements, and the want of separate apartments, are prolific sources of moral degradation, and physical suffering. they operate directly, by vitiating the atmosphere, already too confined for a majority of the inmates, while, by close approximation of both sexes, and all ages and relationships, and often no relationship except necessity, and a too familiar intercourse of parents, sons and daughters, without partition or curtain to shield them, night or day, sleeping in the same room, and often in the same bed, there are created an indifference to the common decencies of life, and a disregard of the sacred obligations of moral propriety, which result in a depressing effect upon the physiological energies, and powerfully heighten the susceptibility to, and render more difficult the cure of diseases among them. The coincidence, or parallelism, of moral degradation and physical disease, is plainly apparent to an experienced observer.

By providing the laboring classes with better tenements, improved ventilation, and healthy and cleanly arrangements in respect to yards, sinks and sewerage, they will certainly suffer less from sickness and premature mortality, an a vast amount of pauperism, crime, and wretchedness be prevented. On the other hand, it is a well established fact, that diseases are not confined to the localities where they originate, but widely diffuse their poisonous miasma. Hence, though the poor may fall in greater numbers because of their nearer proximity to the causes of disease, yet the rich, who inhabit the splendid squares and spacious streets of this metropolis, often become the victims of the same disorders which afflict their poorer brethren. Nor should the momentous fact be overlooked, that the same causes which occasion a great amount of physical suffering to the laborer, and a high rate of mortality, at the same time impair his ability of self-support, increase taxation, and present almost insuperable obstacles to his social elevation, and moral and religious improvement.

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