Quote of the Day (Philip Hone, on 19th-Century New York’s Version of Swine Flu)

“Poor New York has become a charnel house; people die daily of cholera to the number of two or three hundred that is, of cholera and other cognate diseases. But this mortality is principally among the emigrants in the eastern and western extremities of the city, where hundreds are crowded into a few wretched hovels, amidst filth and bad air, suffering from personal neglect and poisoned by eating garbage which a well-bred hog on a Westchester farm would turn up his snout at. It is remarkable that the three lower wards of the city, which in yellow-fever times were the seat of the disease, are now nearly exempt from the cholera, and the upper wards, our place of refuge from the pestilence of those days, have become almost exclusively the scene of ‘death's doings.’”—Philip Hone, diary entry for July 28, 1849, in The Diary of Philip Hone, 1828-1851 (1910)

The two major New York diarists of the 19th century are usually acknowledged to be Philip Hone and George Templeton Strong. Their combined daily jottings cover approximately 6 million words and more than 40 years in the life of the city, stretching from the rise of Jacksonian Democracy to the early post-Civil War period.

The two had something else in common besides the urge to record the doings of their world incessantly: membership in Gotham’s upper crust, giving them an eagle’s-eye—i.e., often unforgiving—view of the city’s new arrivals. You can see it in Strong’s horror at the New York City Draft Riots in the Civil War, in his wish to declare “war…on the Irish scum.”

Hone was scarcely better, as you might infer from the quote about the “emigrants” in their “few wretched hovels.” His attitude, unfortunately, was a common one in the 19th century, when diseases like cholera were blamed on the poor.

In thinking of how swine flu differs from cholera, I thought of how globalism hastens transmission of the new disease. But cholera and other dreaded epidemics of the 19th century were spread by the same phenomenon that characterizes globalism: advances in transportation and communication. Only, in the case of cholera, it was canals, roads, and steamboats that sped the disease. (In his History of the United States of America During the Administrations of James Madison, Henry Adams pointed to the signal advantage that New York began to enjoy because of Robert Fulton’s boat, the Clermont, and the Erie Canal.)

America experienced major cholera epidemics in 1832, 1848 and 1864. At first, public-health authorities believed that the disease was a) not contagious, and b) spread by miasmic conditions induced by the physical and moral filth and decay of densely populated slums. Only toward the end of the century, when Robert Koch identified the cholera bacillus and rising standards of living and better sanitation practices were put into effect, did the scourge of cholera subside.