SANITATION AND PUBLIC HEALTH: PHILADELPHIA, 1870-1900

The history of sanitation and public health in Philadelphia between 1870 and 1900 is a study of the science and technology of the prevention and transmission of endemic and epidemic disease. It is an examination of the education of personal and public hygiene provided by medical and engineering schools in the city. It is a study of the method adopted by the city to implement a program of sanitary reform, and its effect on the health and well-being of the inhabitants of the "City of Brotherly Love".; Philadelphia was determined to become a great center of commerce and industry. Massive aid, in money and manpower, was provided to bring to fruition an early dream, even at the expense of essential sanitary services which were required by the people of the city. The concept that property rights were of a higher priority than human rights was recognized and accepted by government and industry. The steady influx of workers forced into the slums of the city, accepted these unsanitary conditions because they compared what had been left behind with the hope for the future. However, because of the unhealthy living conditions, many never lived to realize their hopes for the future.; In 1903 Lincoln Steffens, from the vantage point of middle-class respectability, made his jeremiad against the alleged corruption of Philadelphia; he hurled invectives, ignoring more than two hundred years of ingrained institutions which had permitted these conditions to exist. Many of the institutions to which he objected were reaffirmed by businessmen and industrialists, with the support of the politicians (all of whom enjoyed the monetary fruits of the system). It was Steffens who insisted that the people would remain docile and satisfied as long as they were provided with "...good water, good light, clean streets well paved, fair transportation, the decent repression of vice, public order and public safety, and no scandalous or open corruption would more than satisfy them. It would be good business and good politics to give them these things." In an age of corruption in municipal and state government, there is an apparent paradox, for between 1870 and 1900 there was impure water, filthy and poorly paved streets, unsanitary drainage and sewage system; yet there were no revolts and little reformation.; The significant facts were not the lack of needed sanitary services, or the lack of activity of the municipal authorities in behalf of sanitary reform; the most fearful aspect was the lack of moral indignation by the members of the medical profession who allowed these unhealthy conditions to exist unchallenged.; The Philadelphia politician may have been politically corrupt, but he was not a spendthrift. Committed to a program of low taxes and high tariffs, and beset by contradictory scientific and technical advice, the politican moved cautiously to provide needed sanitary services. The reform candidates were content to allow the existing municipal services to deteriorate in their eagerness for "efficiency" and municipal savings. The working class and the poor accepted their lot and did little to exert pressures on the municipal authorities to ameliorate their unsanitary living conditions; while the blacks and the immigrants, who constituted thirty percent of the city's population, were ignored and demeaned. As for Lincoln Steffens, he was wrong; in Philadelphia the people had polluted water, badly paved and dirty streets and unclean air, but machine politicians flourished, and the people remained docile if not contented.