beneficial that it would not only become very popular in this city,
but that it would be the basis of future health legislation in this
country. He believed, however, that no legislature would pass a bill
containing such powers if these powers were made a prominent feature
of the bill. For that reason he had adopted that involved expression
peculiar to English law which required a judicial interpretation to
determine the precise meaning. The bill was approved in the form
presented by Mr. Eaton, and preparation was made to secure its passage.
[Sidenote: The Fight for the Bill]
As the City Inspector with his health wardens always appeared at Albany
when a health bill was before the Legislature, denying vociferously
the alleged unsanitary condition of the city, Mr. Eaton advised that
the Association make a careful inspection of the city with its own
inspectors. This inspection was organized by the Council of Hygiene and
prosecuted during the summer of 1864 by young physicians, and was the
most exhaustive study of the sanitary condition ever made of a city,
even by officials. The results were published in a large volume which
has been pronounced by authorities at home and abroad as equal to the
best official reports of European cities.
The bill was early introduced into the Legislature of 1865. In due time
it came before a joint committee of both houses, with Senator Andrew
D. White in the chair. The City Inspector, with his health wardens,
was present, and a large attendance of members with several prominent
citizens of New York. At Mr. Eaton’s request I described the deplorable
sanitary condition of the city as revealed by our inspections and
explained the medical features of the bill. He followed with a
brilliant and exhaustive speech on the nature of sanitary legislation
and the value to cities of adequate health laws administered by
well-organized boards of health.
At the conclusion of the hearing the members of the committee assured
us that if the two houses were in session they would pass the bill
at once. But we were doomed to disappointment. The City Inspector
secured delays, and meantime employed through his agents the means at
his command to defeat the bill. The agitation, however, was continued
during the year, chiefly through the _New York Times_, then under the
management of Mr. Raymond, an ardent reformer.
[Sidenote: A Law Enacted and Sustained]
Mr. Eaton advised the Medical Council to interest the physicians of the
country, and especially urge them not to nominate men who had voted
against the bill in the last Legislature. This plan was carried out,
and seventeen former members failed of renomination to the Assembly.
The result of this scheme succeeded admirably, for the new Legislature
was to some extent pledged to support the bill when they came to the
capitol. The bill promptly passed both houses early in the session of
1866, and in March the Metropolitan Board of Health was organized. Mr.
Eaton accepted the position of counsellor to the board, which position
he retained several years.
As he had anticipated, a suit against the Board was early commenced
to test the constitutionality of the law. He was very apprehensive
of the results, and made the most thorough preparation to argue the
case. He was successful in the lower courts, and finally won in the
Court of Appeals by a majority of one. He always regarded his success
in the management of this case as one of the most important events of
his life, for on the decision of the highest court depended the fate of
health legislation in this country.
[Sidenote: The Regeneration of New York]
No one unfamiliar with the sanitary condition of this city prior
to 1864 can form any adequate conception of the enormous benefits
conferred, not only upon this metropolis, but upon the entire country,
by the labors of Mr. Eaton and his associates in securing to it the
Metropolitan Health Law. During the former period New York was a
prey to every form of pestilence known to man. Smallpox, the most
preventable of contagious diseases, was epidemic in this city every
five years, and created a large death-rate among the children. Scarlet
fever and diphtheria spread through the city without the slightest
effort on the part of the officials to control them. Cholera visited
us once in ten years without any adequate measures of prevention. The
mortality was greater than of any other city of a civilized country, it
being estimated that 7,000 died yearly from preventable diseases.
The tenement-house population lived under the most unhealthy and
degrading conditions, a prey to greedy landlords, and without any
possible relief or redress. In one notorious building, which covered an
ordinary city lot, were fifty families, with a total population of five
hundred persons.
Here every form of domestic pestilence could be found at all seasons
of the year. Still more deplorable was the condition of the tenants of
cellars. Of these so-called “Troglodytes” there were 5,000 living in
rooms the ceilings of which were below the level of the surface of the
street.
To the present generation it may appear incredible that there was
neither law, ordinance, nor department of the city government capable
of giving the slightest relief. This was illustrated in an attempt
to break up a fever nest in 1860. The landlord refused to make the
slightest repairs, or cleansing, in a tenement house from which upwards
of one hundred cases of fever have been removed to the hospital.
The attorney to the Police Department was unable to find any law or
ordinance by which he could be compelled to cleanse, repair, or vacate
the house. It was only by confronting him in court, to which he had
been brought on a fictitious charge, with a reporter, that he was
induced to take any steps to improve the tenement.
[Sidenote: Epidemics Checked]
Now everything relating to the public health is so changed that it is
almost impossible to realize the condition of the city in 1866. The
change began with the very organization of the Metropolitan Board.
Within a few days of that event, cholera, which had devastated portions
of Europe, made its appearance in this city; but it met with a far
different reception than that of former visitations. The first case
was quarantined within an hour of its occurrence; the clothing of the
patient was destroyed, the room disinfected, and a sanitary guard
placed over the house. No other case appeared in that quarter of the
city. There were several similar outbreaks in different parts of the
town, but each was treated with the same vigilance and energy, and the
contagion never secured a foothold in the city or the metropolitan
district.
Though cholera has since appeared in Europe at its usual intervals, and
has several times been at our doors, it has not been able to invade the
city for a period of thirty-four years. Smallpox, which once decimated
the child population every five years, has not been epidemic in a whole
generation. Diphtheria and the whole brood of domestic pestilences are
diminishing in frequency and fatality. Even consumption, so common and
fatal among the poor, is rapidly disappearing in consequence of the
improved condition of the tenement houses.
And what a vast change has been made in the homes of the poor! No human
habitation is underground; the ancient rookery, with its five hundred
inhabitants, is a past number; the dark, foul courts are disappearing,
and in their places have arisen the modern tenements, with their
light, airy, and cheerful apartments, and all the conditions necessary
to family health and domestic happiness. The laws and ordinances all
conspire to compel the landlords to remedy every defect on complaint of
the tenant; the penalty being that the latter need not pay rent until
the home is made habitable in a sanitary sense. The vital statistics
show that human life is lengthening in this city, and that the entire
metropolis is more healthy as a place of residence than the surrounding
country towns.
[Sidenote: Sanitation in Other Cities]
But the beneficent results of the labors of Mr. Eaton and his
associates in the field of sanitary legislation are not confined to New
York. As he predicted, the Metropolitan Health Law became the basis
of sanitary legislation throughout the country. At the time of its
enactment the municipalities of the United States were as destitute
of health laws and regulations as the City of New York. To-day there
is not a city, or even village, that has not its laws and ordinances
relating to the preservation and promotion of the public health based
on the original law drawn by Mr. Eaton. And the same remark is true of
the organized health administration of the States of the Union, for
on analysis it will be found that their sanitary legislation is in
harmony with the provisions of that law. Mr. Eaton’s work was broad and
fundamental.
[Sidenote: Reorganization of the Fire Department]
At that period the old Volunteer Fire Department was quite as
discreditable to the city as was its health organization. Intrenched
in the political organizations of the city, it wielded a power second
only to that of the great political parties themselves. It required
the strength and courage of a Hercules to purify this department by
removing the existing elements, reconstructing the entire organization,
substituting a paid for a volunteer membership, and requiring a high
grade of qualification of its officers.
But, aided by the Citizens’ Association, Mr. Eaton undertook this
reform, and after a fierce and prolonged struggle carried it to a
successful conclusion. The law creating the fire department, like
that creating the health department, is a model of intelligent
discrimination of all the conditions essential to the efficiency of the
service and its permanent freedom from the vices inherent in the old
system.
[Sidenote: Creation of a Dock Department]
Scarcely had these reforms been perfected when Mr. Eaton’s attention
was turned by the Citizens’ Association to the necessity of having
a department in the city government devoted exclusively to the care
and management of the public docks, wharves, and other water-front
interests of the city. This movement resulted in the passage of the
law drawn by Mr. Eaton creating the Department of Docks. Though this
Department was to occupy an entirely new field in the Municipal
Administration, the law shows in every section the same mastery of all
the details peculiar to Mr. Eaton’s legislative work.
[Sidenote: Reform of the Police Judiciary]
Finally, Mr. Eaton undertook, single-handed, to reform the police
judiciary. He prepared a bill creating the civil magistrates to take
the place of the police justices and reforming in many particulars the
methods of procedure. This law is regarded as a great improvement upon
the previous police judiciary, but the bill became a law only after a
protracted struggle with the old police justices, a struggle which Mr.
Eaton maintained alone, relying upon the merits of the measure which he
advocated. The consensus of opinion of legal authorities is that the
new law effected radical reforms of great importance in these inferior
courts of criminal jurisprudence in New York City.
[Sidenote: Mental Traits of Dorman B. Eaton]
If we may estimate Mr. Eaton’s mental traits by the laws which he
drafted in the interests of municipal reform, we can readily conclude
that he had a remarkable genius for constructive legislation.
Though he was compelled to weave into the very woof of those laws,
extraordinary powers, which he acknowledged were of vital importance
to their efficiency, and yet would be a menace to the public, if the
laws were administered by unscrupulous persons, he succeeded in so
guarding those powers that these laws have been in operation upwards
of a quarter of a century; and, while those who have from time to time
been called to administer them have not always had the best reputation
for intelligence and civic virtue, yet there has at no time been any
complaint of injustice in their execution, nor has there been any
serious lapse in their vigorous enforcement. To-day, as a generation
ago, they are accomplishing the full measure of usefulness for which
they were designed by their author.
Standing now at the close of a life so largely devoted to the service
of his fellow-men and consecrated to the amelioration of human
suffering, and where we may, in some slight degree, estimate the vast
and ever-increasing fruition of its labors, how sublime it appears!
Monuments and memorials can but faintly symbolize its greatness and
perpetuate its enduring force. Mr. Eaton’s own thought of true fame
once was expressed to me thus: “I ask only to be remembered as one who
in his sphere of life’s duties endeavored to improve the conditions of
human life around him.”
VII
THE OCCULT POWER OF FILTH
[Sidenote: Filth Diseases]
In the retrospect from the vantage ground of half a century of sanitary
progress we recognize that during the third quarter of the last
century the people of England were waging a successful war on domestic
uncleanliness as a contributory, if not the sole cause of epidemic
diseases. The health officer of England insisted that domestic filth
was the actual cause of many of the low forms of disease, and named
them accordingly, “filth diseases.” This official act of the highest
health authority of that country led to the practice of cleanliness in
the home and its surroundings. Filth in every form was removed as the
necessary remedial measure against these diseases, with the result that
not only were foreign pestilences prevented, but the whole brood of
domestic diseases was greatly reduced in number, and the severity of
cases that did occur was greatly diminished in virulence.
But during the fourth quarter of the last century the question arose
among scientists, “Why is filth--that is, decomposing matter--the
prolific cause of disease?” The answer came from the famous Pasteur
of Paris, and Lister of Edinburgh. “Filth is dangerous, because it is
filled with germ life. The mere removal of filth from one locality to
another does not render it harmless, except to those who are no longer
in personal contact with it.” So-called filth was indeed harmless if
the germs it contained were killed.
[Sidenote: The Scheme of Sanitation Changed]
The whole scheme of sanitation was at once changed: agents that would
kill germs were eagerly sought by many scientists, and germicides were
found in abundance. Cremation was most effectful, and was available
in the destruction of masses of filth; but there was a phase of the
question that required other methods.
Lister announced that these disease-producing germs entered wounds
and prevented healing, and that a germicide was required which would
kill the germ in the wound and would not injure the living, healthy
tissue. Further investigations showed that these dangerous germs were
not confined to dust heaps, but existed in the unclean recesses of the
human body.
Sternberg startled the world with the announcement that an unclean
human mouth contained germs of the most poisonous character.
An eminent German surgeon declared that germs of a dangerous character
existed in the folds of the skin of the palms of the hand which no
amount of washing with soap and water could remove, and could be
destroyed only by some agent directly applied.
Sanitation of the body as well as of the dust heap now became the
paramount question and especially did this apply to the practice of
surgery.
[Sidenote: The Mystery of Infection]
How infection affects the body was the supreme mystery that the
scientists of the past strove in vain to penetrate. By no devices
of their laboratories could they detect the agents that caused the
epidemic. There was only one satisfactory explanation of the origin
and spread of the devastating plagues, which seemed to fall from
the heavens on the people, and that was that epidemics were “a
visitation of God” on account of the sins of the people. Of course,
the only preventive and curative measure available and effectual was
“repentance, prayer, and humiliation.”
It is a cause of devout thankfulness that while these things were
hidden from the “wise and prudent” of former times, they have in these
latter days been revealed unto “babes.” No event in human history
would have more greatly taxed the credulity of the most learned and
experienced physician of half a century ago than the prophecy that
in the early years of the twentieth century school children would be
taught by simple and easily understood object lessons how to prevent
and how to cure consumption, the Asiatic cholera, yellow fever, and
other epidemics that have devastated cities, destroyed armies, and
swept from the earth whole tribes of primitive people.
But that prophecy has been literally fulfilled. During the last summer
there has been a traveling object lesson that visited the different
sections of the State of New York and taught the people, especially the
children, all the essential facts as to the nature of the infection of
tuberculosis, its effects on the body, and the methods of prevention
and cure.
[Sidenote: How Infection Works]
As infective diseases cause the vast majority of cases of severe and
crippling affections and of deaths in every community, the value of
a knowledge of the nature of infection and how it affects the body,
by the people of all ranks, ages, and conditions, cannot be estimated
in its influence on the future of the human race. Already we learn
that within the period referred to the sickness and death-rates of
communities where the people have been most thoroughly instructed as
to the nature of infective diseases, and how they affect the body,
have greatly diminished, and the average human life has been markedly
lengthened. Indeed, it now seems possible to restore the patriarchal
age when a man may live to be “an hundred and twenty years old ... his
eye ... not dim, nor his natural force abated.”
To understand how infection affects the body involves an inquiry as
to the nature of infection, its mode of entrance into the body, and
its operation on its organs and tissues. The terms “infection” and
“contagion” are often used as synonymous; but a strict definition
according to the medical significance of each limits the former to
“the transmission of disease by actual contact of the diseased part
with a healthy absorbent or abraded surface,” and the latter to
“transmission through the atmosphere by floating germs.” But in the
final analysis the cause of disease in both infection and contagion
is so similar in its action that the medical profession has adopted
the term “communicable disease” in all cases where the disease is
communicated from one person to another by means of a germ, whatever
may be its method of attack on the body. The common characteristic of
“communicable diseases” is their germ origin.
[Sidenote: What the Germ Is]
What is this communicable germ or agent? A bacterium--a little stick,
staff--so called from the rodlike shape it assumes in the process of
growth. The individual bacterium (plural, bacteria) is an organism
representing a low form of vegetable life; resembles mold; in size the
smallest living thing that can be seen with the microscope; in masses
forming the films floating on foul fluids or covering decomposing
animal or vegetable matter. It consists of a single cell, and its
mode of increase when placed under proper conditions of growth is
by division of the cell body; the two cells formed out of the first
being divided into four before complete separation has taken place;
the four dividing into eight, the eight into sixteen, the sixteen into
thirty-two, and so on indefinitely.
Now, as it requires only thirty minutes for one cell to divide, it
has been estimated that a single bacterium will in twenty-four hours
increase to the number of over sixteen million five hundred thousand,
and in forty-eight hours to two hundred and eighty-one million five
hundred thousand. At this rate of increase, in three days there would
be a mass of bacteria weighing about sixteen million pounds. As the
multiplication of bacteria depends upon conditions that soon interfere
with or interrupt their growth, as the want of food, their own
secretions, and certain natural forces operating against them, these
stupendous figures are useful only as an illustration of the enormous
fertility of these organisms, and their destructive energy when they
attack a susceptible living body.
[Sidenote: The Function of Bacteria]
What is the function of bacteria in the economy of nature? It would be
surprising if such a menace to human life as some species of bacteria
have proved themselves to be had no other place among the forces of
nature than to prevent the too rapid increase of the human race on
this earth, as our forefathers believed. It is gratifying, and quite
satisfying to a revengeful spirit, to learn from the modern laboratory
that the special and only function of the bacterium is to perform the
duties of a universal scavenger. It is always seeking to decompose
animal and vegetable matter. It lives on filth, riots in it, and dies
when deprived of it. It enters the human body only in search of filth,
and if it finds none it does the person no harm, and dies either
from the want of food or by starvation, or escapes from the body, or
secretes itself where it may safely await the creation of decomposing
matter, when it will begin its life-work.
Thus, there may be and doubtless is at all times a great variety of
bacteria of a virulent type, quiescent in our bodies only for the time
that they find no decaying matter adapted to their special tastes or
wants.
It is a most interesting fact, therefore, that this most deadly foe of
man becomes dangerous only when the latter is harboring in his body
waste or decomposing matters that are slowly poisoning him. It is in
the process of digesting this material that the bacterium excretes
poisons--toxins--of the most virulent nature, which are absorbed into
the blood of the human victim, creating the condition popularly known
as blood poisoning.
Bacteria perform a most important function in the economy of nature,
viz., the conversion of decaying and dead matter into food for plants.
Biologists assert that without bacteria plant life on the earth would
be scanty or entirely wanting; they are the natural intermediaries
between plants and animal in point of food production. They are
therefore called scavengers, because they live on decomposing matter;
but in the very act of digesting such waste they convert it into
products essential to plant life (carbon dioxide and ammonia) and by
their excretions restore to vegetation its chief supply of food.
It appears on the same authorities that bacteria not only assist
materially in maintaining vegetable and animal life on this planet,
but “in the arts and industries they are as essential to modern
economic life as are the ingenious mechanical inventions of men.
Many secret processes now in use in the arts and manufactures are
but devices to harness these natural forces. Thus in the manufacture
of linen, hemp, and sponges, in the butter, cheese, and vinegar
industries, in tobacco-curing, etc., bacteria play an important rôle.”
[Sidenote: Bacteria for Every Condition]
It naturally occurs that to meet the various conditions under which
decomposing matter exists in nature there is a great variety of
species of bacteria, each species being adapted to a special field
of operations. These species are distinguished from one another by
the shapes they assume during their growth, some being rod shaped
(the bacillus), others spherical (the coccus), and others spiral (the
spirillum). Under one of these divisions the various species are
classified.
In these latter days of popular knowledge of scientific progress,
but without precise information of details, bacteria are associated
in the public mind with disease, especially of the epidemic form.
While this prejudice is useful in stimulating the people to adopt and
enforce preventive measures against conditions that tend to promote
bacterial life in their homes and in their own persons, yet it should
be understood that comparatively few of the great number and variety
of bacteria are pathogenic, or disease producing, in man.