{"id":3589,"date":"2011-01-21T14:25:15","date_gmt":"2011-01-21T19:25:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/?p=3589"},"modified":"2011-01-21T11:29:06","modified_gmt":"2011-01-21T16:29:06","slug":"3589","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/2011\/01\/21\/3589\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cCauses of Excessive Mortality in New York”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a> New York<\/a> \u201cis one of the most unhealthy cities on the globe\u201d and, as the Lowell (MA) Citizen & News<\/em> explained <\/a>in March 1859, \u201cthe unhealthiness of the city\u201d had once again \u201cattract[ed] the attention of the legislators at Albany.\u201d Two years later the situation in that city had not improved. After the health officer for New York City released a report in early 1861, James Gordon Bennett\u2019s<\/a> New York Herald<\/em> examined<\/a> several of \u201cthe secret sources of excessive disease and death.\u201d The Herald<\/em> believed that while their city was \u201cnaturally more healthy than\u201d any other one in North America, they noted that the \u201cexcessive mortality\u201d rate did not reflect that fact. While the \u201cfilthy conditions\u201d was an obvious \u201csource of mortality,\u201d other important factors included the lack of vaccination. The Herald<\/em> argued that the city should follow the example of other countries like Sweden and enact \u201ca compulsory law for vaccination.\u201d If \u201cthe vaccination [for smallpox] has been perfectly performed,\u201d the Herald<\/em> explained <\/a>that \u201cthe mortality is found to be uniformly reduced to less than one in every two hundred cases.\u201d Immigrants were also identified as a cause of the \u201cexcessive mortality.\u201d \u201cMost of the children who die under one year of age are the offspring of foreigners\u201d who had \u201crecently arrived\u201d in the United States, as the Herald<\/em>claimed. Other factors included abortions through \u201cviolent means\u201d and those \u201ckilled\u2026by quack medicine.\u201d Yet not all cities faced this kind of health crisis. An editorial<\/a> in the Cleveland (OH) Herald<\/em> was optimistic as the city\u2019s mortality rate had declined even as the city\u2019s population increased. \u201cThe introduction of pure water in unlimited quantity has doubtless had much to do with the improved sanitary condition of the city,\u201d as the Cleveland Herald<\/em> explained.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New York \u201cis one of the most unhealthy cities on the globe\u201d and, as the Lowell (MA) Citizen & News explained in March 1859, \u201cthe unhealthiness of the city\u201d had once again \u201cattract[ed] the attention of the legislators at Albany.\u201d Two years later the situation in that city had not improved. After the health officer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[77,171],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-antebellum-1840-1861","category-historic-periodicals"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3589"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3589\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3599,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3589\/revisions\/3599"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}