HUB History - Our Favorite Stories from Boston History

Cholera is a truly horrifying disease, with severe diarrhea causing death through dehydration, while the patient remains awake and in agony. The disease is carried by fecal bacteria, so it’s virtually unknown in highly developed countries today, because of our sophisticated sewage and drinking water systems. Back in 1849, Boston had just begun to address its drinking water needs, with the Cochituate aqueduct opening the year before. We had not, however, even begun to deal with our sewage. In most of Boston, raw sewage ran in open gutters down the sides of the street. When the first major cholera epidemic hit Boston in the summer of 1849, hundreds died. There were no antibiotics or IV rehydration to treat victims with. Instead, the city government took a public health approach that was focused on sanitation first.

Please check out the transcript and full show notes at: http://HUBhistory.com/161/

And support the show on Patreon. Boston in the Time of Cholera

• Boston forms a Board of Health Commissioners in response to the threat of a cholera epidemic in 1832
• The Board of Health Commissioners gives terrible advice on how to avoid contracting cholera
• The 1849 Internal Health Department report on the cholera epidemic
• Map showing concentrations of cholera infections near Fort Hill, in the North End, and along the South Cove in 1849, highlighted below

• 1852 map that includes the location of Half Moon Court, detail shown below.

• 1869 map outlining how the city counsel would redraw the street grid to eliminate Half Moon Court and similar alleys.
• An 1849 editorial in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal that basically blames Irish immigrants for their own health problems.
• Dr. JH McCollum’s 1892 “Observations on Cholera” in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal
• Report on the 1866 outbreak of cholera in Boston
• Ball, Laura. “Cholera and the Pump on Broad Street: The Life and Legacy of John Snow.” The History Teacher
• GF Pyle’s “The Diffusion of Cholera in the United States in the Nineteenth Century”
• Cholera hits Boston in 2011
• A summary of how cholera completely decimated Boston, Indiana in 1849

Public Health in the Town of Boston, 1630-1822 is an extensive study of Boston’s battle against epidemic disease in the years between English colonization and incorporation as a city that was published in 1959 by Dr. John Blake. We didn’t even know this book existed until recently, but once we discovered it, we realized we had missed out on an important book. I can’t believe that we released two different episodes about the 1721 smallpox epidemic, not to mention the Spanish flu, without consulting this volume. It’s exhaustively researched, tying Boston’s struggles with smallpox, yellow fever, and dysentery to advances in medicine and broader historical themes.

Here’s how the Harvard University Press describes the book:

In this book, based almost exclusively on original source material, John Blake takes a detailed look at the public health history of the town of Boston. Historically, the author tells us, public health may be viewed as the science and art of preventing disease and promoting health through organized community activity. A significant part of this study is the insight it offers into the early attitudes toward disease and death as well as other basic political, social, and economic questions.

Dr. Blake outlines the development of public health practice from occasional emergency measures to a continuing program for the prevention and control of certain epidemic diseases. The introduction and increasing use of smallpox inoculation and later of vaccination are described and their importance evaluated. The book also discusses the further developments in the 1790s and the following two decades that resulted from a series of yellow-fever epidemics in northern seaports, including the establishment of a board of health and its efforts to prevent recurrence of this disease. The prevention of other endemic infectious diseases, though far more important in their effect on the community’s health, was largely neglected. Nevertheless, the principles of notification, isolation, and quarantine had been established and the need for governmental activity to protect the public health, for special public health officials, and for expenditure of tax money for public health purposes had been recognized.

This study, restricted in time to the period before Boston became a city (1630–1822), deals with the early years of the public health movement, a period that has been largely neglected. In comparing Boston’s experience with that of other colonies and England, Dr. Blake presents the European background in both the theory and practice of epidemiology and public health. The colonies themselves, whose differences caused many contemporaries to despair of their ever becoming a single nation, were yet bound by an essential homogeneity. “By and large they had the same language, the same religion, the same inheritance of British social and political ideals. And by and large they had the same diseases. Thus the history of public health in Boston becomes significant for the whole American experience.”

Back in 1773, colonists in Massachusetts were upset with Parliament, and the tax on tea had become a symbol of everything they were upset about. Before the Boston Tea Party became a symbol for far-right anti-government extremists, before the Boston Tea Party even became a tea party, the town of Lexington had its own tea protest. Three days before the destruction of the tea on Boston Harbor, Lexington residents brought their household tea out to the common and burned it in a giant bonfire. They issued a resolution saying that anyone in Lexington who continued to drink tea would be seen “as an enemy of this town and this country.” It also said, “Should the State of Our Affairs require it, We shall be ready to Sacrifice our Estates, and every thing dear in Life, Yea & Life itself, in support of the common Cause.”

Modern Lexington reenacts the tea burning every December. This year’s day-long Lexington Tea Burning will be held on December 8. There will be musket drills, tours of Buckman Tavern, fife and drum music, and the tea will be burned at 1:30pm. Festivities begin at 11am. The event is free and open to the public.