Read Online Asleep: The Forgotten Epidemic That Remains One of Medicine's Greatest Mysteries by Molly Caldwell Crosby - Free Book Online

from the city; it carried away almost 300,000 smaller animals inside the city; and it inspected nearly 4 million pounds of rancid poultry, fish, pork, or beef. Another year, the New York Times published a list of the dead animals that the health department removed from within the city limits: 3 elephants, nearly 6,000 horses, 308 cattle, 11 colts, 16 ponies, 1 alligator, 2 camels, 1 bear, 1 lion, some 50,000 cats from streets or shelters, and even more dogs.
    Before plumbing, the health department also handled privies and raw sewage, as well as keeping the Croton aqueduct a clean source of water. Since its inception in 1866 until well into the twentieth century, filth, more than disease, had been the department’s main concern. In the past, the health department could do little more than issue sanitation orders, track disease into certain neighborhoods, and quarantine areas. But that was changing.
    Measures as small as coating open water sources with petroleum to kill mosquitoes or providing public bathhouses for the poor or requiring laundry trucks to keep clean towels in public restrooms fell under the jurisdiction of city health. The health department performed tasks as small as inspecting hot dog stands and rounding up drug addicts on the street, but it also had the power for larger initiatives like closing businesses, banning public funerals during an epidemic, or forcing schools to provide open-air classrooms for their tuberculosis patients. The department went so far as to prohibit smoking in certain places—more to address the nuisance of the smoke than the ill effects on health. If smoking was not controlled, health officials warned, there might be a day when smoking would be prohibited in all public places in New York.
    Since the 1890s, New York’s health department, the best in the world, had battled politics as much as microbial foes and lapses in sanitation. The department was trying to maintain a safe distance from the grasp of Tammany Hall, the Democratic political and social machine that had dominated New York politics for nearly 150 years as a force of reform by way of corruption. Tammany politicians wanted control of all municipal departments, among them public health. But rather than filling the department with qualified physicians and scientists, they gave positions out to loyal supporters, whether or not they were qualified, whether or not they even held an M.D. As a result, several doctors serving in the department resigned and announced publicly that they did so because of Tammany control. In other words, public health was so important, so vital to the city’s progress, that it superseded politics.
    Epidemics of cholera and diphtheria in the 1890s put the health department in a role of greater importance and gave recognition to its newly formed Division of Pathology, Bacteriology and Disinfection. The bacteriological laboratory would thrust New York into the spotlight of world medicine and public health. That was a remarkable feat—there were the Johns Hopkins labs, Mayo Clinic, Pasteur Institute in Paris, Lister Institute in London, the clinics in Berlin and Vienna ... and New York’s municipal health department lab.
    Out of that laboratory, and under the talented direction of Hermann Biggs, and later William Park, the diphtheria antitoxin would be developed, as well as groundbreaking work on pneumonia and meningitis. The labs and the New York City Department of Public Health became so valuable that as Tammany again tried to gain control in 1918, in the midst of the great flu pandemic, the U.S. government stepped in and forced Tammany to a sudden halt.
    The health department’s future success would depend on separating itself from political strings and adherence to the way things had been done in the past, and instead devoting its funds to a more modern approach to medicine and the study of disease. New knowledge about germs and viruses enabled health officials to take a direct approach in