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Health and Disease
Contents
Health and Disease >> Childbirth
in the late 19th Century >> Cholera
>> Marasmus and Scrofula >>
Hydrocephalus >> Byssinosis
>> Typhus Fever >> Typhoid
Fever >> Polio >> Infant
Mortality >> Combating Epidemics
at the Turn of the Century >> Tuberculosis
Numerous ailments prevailed around the turn of the century on the
Lower East Side of New York City. The unsanitary and overcrowded
conditions characteristic of the ships carrying immigrants steerage
class, and tenement and working conditions on the Lower East Side
once they arrived, were the foremost contributing factors to outbreaks
of disease. Most native-born New Yorkers from the middle and upper
classes, however, blamed the immigrants themselves for transporting
sickness to America, endangering the well being of their innocent
hosts. This nativism assumed that the country was a virgin land
susceptible to contamination by "unclean" immigrants from abroad
carrying diseases of the mind, body and spirit.
Whenever an epidemic broke out, the most convenient scapegoat was
whatever immigrant group was the largest, most feared and most visible
at the time. Just as tuberculosis was considered a "Jewish Disease"
despite medical evidence to the contrary, other immigrant groups
were identified with a particular disease. Polio was associated
with filth, and filth with Italians, during the polio epidemic that
started in 1907. In the cholera epidemics of the first half of the
19th century, the Five Points area was labeled as the "cholera district"
since its Irish residents suffered the most from the illness. Victims
of disease thus became the source and cause of outbreaks in the
eyes of nativists, journalists and public health and medical professionals
in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
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