The Common Council, the legislative branch of New York City government,
appointed a standing Board of Health in 1805 after a series of yellow
fever epidemics had ravaged the city over the previous decade. The Board
of Health tended to act only in response to the outbreak of disease, setting
aside barracks for the sick, establishing quarantines, and gathering information
to report to the Common Council. Despite its permanence, the activity
of the board ebbed and flowed with the presence of epidemic disease in
the city. After the yellow fever outbreak of 1822, the board did little
for the following decade beyond instituting the occasional quarantine.
As cholera swept through Europe, the board foresaw the responsibility
it would face if the disease jumped the Atlantic. The board had established
a quarantine during the winter months, but pressure through the Common
Council from city merchants eager to receive their goods limited its effectiveness.
When news of the disease's presence in Montreal reached the city, the
board met and established a system employing councilmen as "health
wardens" for each of their wards who would enact the policies of
the board. The board, which had no physicians, also set up a Special Medical
Council consisting of seven prominent doctors to advise and guide its
response.
The board’s first order of business was to secure emergency money
from the Common Council. It then established five temporary hospitals
to care for cholera patients. The next step was to cleanse the streets,
a step meant to "purify" the city to limit cholera's sticking
power. Then the board, believing the overpopulation of the slums contributed
to the foul air that propagated cholera, established a Committee to Provide
Suitable Accommodations for the Destitute Poor, which oversaw the dispersal
of residents of the city's slums to several poor-houses. The condition
of these institutions was usually the same or even worse than the housing
left behind by tenants and, even though private philanthropic organizations
assisted with feeding and clothing the displaced poor, their suffering
continued. Most commerce in the city ground to a halt, as the prosperous
had evacuated and fear gripped those who remained. This added to the problems
of laborers whose ability to support their families depended on the availability
of regular work. The Board of Health also acted as a repository for complaints
about the city's response to the epidemic. The most gruesome concerned
the inadequate disposal of corpses at the city cemetery, Potter's Field,
and compelled the board to lay down specific requirements for how bodies
should be buried.
When cholera was in full swing in the city, the Board of Health was quite
active, performing admirably under dire circumstances. Its response also
can be seen as one of the earliest, large-scale acts of urban municipal
action. Yet, in part due to the lack of knowledge about the disease, and
also to the reluctance of the city's leaders to act until cholera bore
down upon Manhattan, the responses were less effective than they could
have been. Cholera claimed more than 3500 victims as it ran its course
in Manhattan alone during the summer of 1832. But perhaps the most crucial
failure of the Board of Health was that the progress it made during the
1832 epidemic proved transitory. By the middle of the decade, the board's
activities were once again minimal, and would not be expanded again until
cholera struck the city seventeen years later. |