June 4 - Nineteenth-Century Health:
The Good Old Days Were Terrible-2

You shall have a place outside the camp and you shall go out to it; and you shall have a stick with your weapons; and when you sit down outside, you shall dig a hole with it, and turn back and cover up your excrement. Deut. 23:12, 13, RSV.

You may think this a strange devotinal text, but God cares about every aspect of our lives. If people would have followed the biblical injuctions on community health down through history, it would have saved countless millions of lives from disease and epicemics. Should those lives have been those of your spouse or children, you would be jumping up and down praising the Lord for such texts as Deuteronomy 23:12, 13.

Saniation was one aspect of the health problem in nineteenth-century America. Even middle- and often upperclass homes generally still had outdoor privies at midcentury. New York City, for example, had only 10,388 water closets (indoor toilets) in 1855. And the seepage of massed privies made for some interesting bacteriological conditions in well water.

As to garbage, cities had no system for processing it. Most of it ended up in the street for free-running hogs to root in. New York City of the 1840s had thousands of unchaperoned hogs to help care for the problem.

Of course, the omnipresent horse droppings oozed in the generally unpaved streets in wet weather and wre pulverized to highly flavored dust that blew everywhere in dry weather. On New York City streets in 1900 horses deposited an estimated 2.5 million pounds of manure and 60,000 gallons of urine daily. H. L. Menden described an American city as one "solid stink." And rural life wasn't much healthier, most homes being surrounded by "an expanse of muck and naure."

And then there was spitting. In the days before the popularity of the cigarretee, Americans deposited chewing tobacco sputum everywhere, both inside and out, although the more sophisticate didn't spit on the table.

The "good old days" were times of ignorance-ignorance that took a high toll in human lives. THe Memphis, Tennessee, yellow fever epidemic of 1878, for example, killed 5, 150 out of a population of 38,500. That same yer New Orleans lost an estimated 3,977. But that was only half as many deaths as the city's 1853 epidemic, which cost 7,848 lives. People attributed yellow fever and other epidemics to bad air-what the authorities called "miasma." Thus people often slept in poorly ventilated or unventilated rooms to preserve their health.