Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/335

Rh city was made during the year. The city was divided into twenty-nine sanitary districts, and to each district was assigned a competent physician as sanitary inspector, to make a house-to-house visitation, and to report upon every possible source of preventable disease and every nuisance dangerous to life or detrimental to health. The tenement-houses of the city were a special subject of inspection, the inquiry extending to their cleanliness, ventilation, drainage, and water-supply, the disposal of refuse, location and care of water-closets, number of families and amount of air space, cellar population, and the sickness and mortality. The work was faithfully and intelligently accomplished, and in 1865 the reports of the Council of Hygiene and Public Health and of the sanitary inspectors of districts were published in a large volume. These reports were so startling in their disclosures, and the advent of Asiatic cholera was at that time so imminent, that public attention was directed to the subject, and it was not difficult to secure the enactment by the New York Legislature of 1866 of "an act to create a Metropolitan Sanitary District and Board of Health therein, for the preservation of health and life, and to prevent the spread of disease." This act clearly defined the duties of the Board of Health, and conferred upon it discretionary powers, judicial and legislative, never before intrusted to any executive body in this country. Under this law the Board of Health was organized in New York March 5, 1866, and on the 20th day of April it enacted the necessary sanitary rules and regulations for the government of the city, since known as the Sanitary Code.

To demonstrate the sanitary improvement in New York during the quarter of a century that has elapsed since the organization of the Board of Health in 1866, it is necessary to briefly describe the sanitary condition of the city as it appeared to the Council of Hygiene and its sanitary inspectors in 1861. They reported that the death-rate was largely excessive by reason of the great mortality from contagious and preventable diseases; that the tenement-houses of the city, especially those occupied by many families, were overcrowded, unclean, badly lighted and ventilated, imperfectly drained, supplied with large open privies, which were extremely filthy and offensive, causing discomfort and disease among the tenants, and that the manifold evils of the tenement-house system were intensified in many cases by rear houses in close proximity to those fronting on the street; that many dark, damp, and unwholesome cellars were used as human habitations and crowded with tenants and lodgers; that most of the public streets were paved with cobble-stone, out of repair and very imperfectly cleaned, and were a place of deposit for ashes and garbage; that a large part of the business of slaughtering animals was conducted in the tenement-house districts in dilapidated