The Contagious City

The Politics of Public Health in Early Philadelphia

Simon Finger

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780801464478
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

By the time William Penn was planning the colony that would come to be called Pennsylvania, with Philadelphia at its heart, Europeans on both sides of the ocean had long experience with the hazards of city life, disease the most terrifying among them. Drawing from those experiences, colonists hoped to create new urban forms that combined the commercial advantages of a seaport with the health benefits of the country. The Contagious City details how early Americans struggled to preserve their collective health against both the strange new perils of the colonial environment and the familiar dangers of the traditional city, through a period of profound transformation in both politics and medicine.

Philadelphia was the paramount example of this reforming tendency. Tracing the city's history from its founding on the banks of the Delaware River in 1682 to the yellow fever outbreak of 1793, Simon Finger emphasizes the importance of public health and population control in decisions made by the city's planners and leaders. He also shows that key figures in the city's history, including Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush, brought their keen interest in science and medicine into the political sphere. Throughout his account, Finger makes clear that medicine and politics were inextricably linked, and that both undergirded the debates over such crucial concerns as the city's location, its urban plan, its immigration policy, and its creation of institutions of public safety. In framing the history of Philadelphia through the imperatives of public health, The Contagious City offers a bold new vision of the urban history of colonial America.

1

“A Rude Place and an Unpolisht Man”

WILLIAM PENN AND THE NATURE OF PENNSYLVANIA

When Pennsylvania was in its planning stages, William Petty was one of the many figures to offer William Penn advice on establishing his new colony. Petty was in the process of developing a mode of inquiry he called “political arithmetick,” which explained national power in demographic terms. In keeping with that premise, he suggested that Penn plant the future Philadelphia on a “peece of land…chosen for it’s situation, healthfulness, and fertility.” Both men, like their contemporaries, understood that a healthy location was a critical factor in the success or failure of their ventures. When Penn invited Thomas Holme to survey the newly granted land and lay out plots of land for purchase, he therefore ordered him to lay the city out where it was “most navigable, high, dry and healthy.”1

Penn further directed that land be set aside for a “large Towne or Citty in the most convenient place upon the River for health and Navigation,” again stressing the importance of both commercial and physiological concerns. The meaning of healthy land, however, was tied to a complex bundle of ideas about nature, medicine, geography, climate, agriculture, and human difference. Penn’s understanding of how to identify and create such spaces guided his approach to settling the province and to governing it, setting the stage for conflict with settlers and constituents who did not share his assessments of the local conditions or his priorities for the city’s development. It was far from clear that any city could provide both wealth and well-being; most of the era’s major cities were filthy, pestilential places. Penn’s own sentiments were haunted by the living memory of London beset by plague and conflagration. At stake was more than just the proprietor’s power, but broader anxieties about whether English life would survive the journey to America, whether people made their environments or were made by them, and whether commerce and a healthy constitution could coexist.2

William Penn and the Problem of the City

Penn delighted in the rough-hewn charm of his new holdings, “for a rude place & an unpolisht man cant but agree together,” and understanding his dream for Philadelphia begins with the dreamer who saw himself reflected in the land.3 As the historian Mary Dunn has observed, Penn’s complexity too often “remains hidden beneath the broad-brimmed hat.” He was a tireless champion of religious freedom, and he maintained a sincere belief in the possibility of government built on persuasion rather than coercion. He idealized rural virtue and plain living. And yet, in the words of another scholar, he was also “essentially a man of action, restless and enterprising, at times a courtier and a politician, who loved handsome dress, lived well and lavishly.” He was an aristocrat-proprietor with feudal pretensions to manorial privilege, who embraced rusticity more in theory than in practice.4

Penn’s father, Admiral William Penn, had supported the Stuart bid to reclaim the English throne, and in payment of that debt, Charles II granted the younger William an enormous 45,000 square mile tract, carved from the even vaster lands seized from the Dutch and administered by the Duke of York. Penn had managed his family’s plantations in Ireland and invested in the West Jersey colony. But the domains named for his father, and granted for his father’s actions, came with far more expansive territory and far more expansive powers to shape its society according to Penn’s vision. That vision did not include cities. Penn counted himself among the rural gentry, and he shared their characteristic distrust of urban life. Of “Citys and towns of concourse beware,” he warned his wife, for they were dangerous to body and soul.5

By the seventeenth century, it was obvious that cities generated health risks unknown in rural communities, hazards growing impossible to ignore. Chests tightened at the sulfurous smoke pouring from the coal-burning furnaces of protoindustrial workshops. Stomachs turned at the stench of butcher stalls. Eyes watered from the acrid by-products of “noxious trades” like soap-making, candle manufacture, and leather tanning. Confronted by such hazards, improvers and medical men searched in earnest for explanations and solutions. The naturalist John Evelyn (1620–1706) greeted the 1660 coronation of Charles II with his Fumifugium, an essay on the dire condition of London’s atmosphere and what could be done to correct it. Such vapors were only the most obvious signs of the evils, both physical and moral, that he attributed to urban life. Marshaling both classical sources and the latest London mortality statistics from fellow-improver John Graunt, Evelyn pilloried the Interregnum Puritans for inundating the city’s atmosphere with unhealthy miasmas and deforesting the area around London, thereby destroying the greenery whose perfumes could allay the situation. The smog was an allegory for Interregnum political corruption, blanketing the city like a layer of soot. But Evelyn’s Fumifugium was foremost a literal document, laying out a specific program for improving municipal public health. His Sylva of 1664 resumed the theme, arguing that putrid cities could achieve “melioration of the Airs by the plantation of proper trees.”6

Any ambivalence Penn felt about cities evaporated following London’s “Devil’s Year,” the cascading catastrophes of 1665–1666: war, plague, starvation, and a killing frost, capped by a devastating fire. Though most people had long acknowledged that cities were sicklier than countryside, and urban outbreaks more severe than rural, the plague of 1665–1666 still shocked even the most jaded Londoner. Scores fled in search of sanctuary. Some took the scourge as divine judgment on a corrupted civilization, particularly as it raged into the eschatologically ominous year of 1666. The plague’s tyranny over the city ended only with another calamity, the great fire that burned out the remaining repositories of infection. Indeed, Penn’s first colonial experience, as administrator of his family estates in Ireland, resulted from Admiral Penn’s desire to remove his sensitive young son from London during the plague year.7

Penn’s inclination ran against the era’s imperial grain: political and economic factors demanded that he establish a city overseas. The restoration of royal authority in England had transformed the empire, resulting in more urbanized and less autonomous colonies, with more concentrated populations under more thorough English control. The chief architect of this “grand modell” was Anthony Ashley Cooper (1621–1683), the Earl of Shaftesbury and a principal proprietor of the Carolina colony, who argued that there was nothing more important “for the security and thriving of our Settlement than…planting in Townes.” Cities would promote trade and stimulate economic development, provide more effective defense against indigenous and European enemies, and deter smuggling by filtering colonial produce through designated seaports. Despite his sentiments, Penn knew that Pennsylvania would need a port to be economically viable and to attract investors and settlers. He worried about competing with the more convenient New York, and he fought hard against Maryland’s territorial claims so that he could keep the Delaware River within his colony, thereby ensuring direct access to the ocean.8

“Such a Situation Is Scarce to be Paralleled”

Like Penn, Thomas Holme had experience managing an Irish estate, but he had earned his four thousand acres by serving in Cromwell’s army to topple the Stuart monarchs who later reclaimed the throne and who repaid their debts to Admiral Penn by granting American lands to his son. Religious bonds helped Penn and Holme escape the burden of their tangled political commitments. Having retired from soldiering, Holme adopted his future employer’s faith. Penn encountered Holme in England’s Quaker circles and saw in his fellow Friend an ideal candidate to replace original surveyor William Crispin, who had perished on his voyage to America.9

Charged with researching Pennsylvania’s disease environment, Holme was equipped with the received wisdom, empirical observation, and practical experience that constituted the era’s medical theory. At the core of these doctrines sat Galen’s interpretation of Hippocratic physiology, which posited that the body was composed of the seven “naturals”: elements, qualities, humors, members, faculties, spirits, and operations. Most significant to pathology were the humors: black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm, which corresponded to the four seasons; to the Hellenic cosmological elements of earth, fire, air, and water; and to the qualities of chill, heat, dryness, and moisture. The body naturally existed in a state of equilibrium or near-equilibrium, but the naturals were always subject to the influence of the six “non-naturals”: retentions/evacuations, rest/motion, sleep/waking, food/water, air, and “affections of the soul,” or passions.10

The power of air to affect humoral balance gave physical spaces a critical role in disease etiology. Thomas Sydenham, perhaps the most famous physician in England, used his influence to promote a revised version of Hippocratic environmentalism centered on the role of “epidemic constitutions.” Under that theory, the atmosphere of any given site was the product of local components, and the specific mixture of these elements determined what diseases would be endemic there. The specific composition could fluctuate, due to the influence of decaying plant and animal matter, the exhalations of the sick, or more mysterious adulterants, sometimes as esoteric as starlight. Specific locations each had their own constitutions, but neo-Hippocratic theory also offered more general principles: places that were low, wet, or wild were dangerous; those that were airy, high, and regular were wholesome; and rural spaces were exalted above all others. Orderly planted fields represented the spatial golden mean between two extremes of miasmatic contamination: the wilderness and the seaport.11

The non-naturals, meanwhile, provided the basis of a social therapeutics. Medical men prescribed behavioral reform to cure individuals and posited ideal dietary and physical routines that they hoped would preserve health on a collective level. And because the connection between passions and humors ran both ways, medical theory even expounded “healthy” ideas and beliefs. The Hippocratic synthesis faced increasing criticism by the latter half of the seventeenth century, as microscopy and other technological advances revealed a theretofore hidden world inconsistent with the Galenic body, and a physiology centered on solid tissues—especially nerve fibers—supplanted the traditional focus on fluids. Even so, it was difficult to dislodge entirely the power of a deeply held theoretical tradition.12 Galenic therapeutics long outlived the intellectual system that sustained them. Well into the nineteenth century, physicians continued to bleed patients and manage the non-naturals in ways that would be familiar to a Renaissance practitioner.13

Colonial experience—in Jamestown, Charles Town, and the charnel houses of the Caribbean—powerfully influenced the English understanding of climate and its effect on human health. Virginia’s early promoters hoped that its warmth would “norishe and bryng fourth gold, spices, stones and pearls,” as they believed it had in the balmy and lucrative Spanish mining settlements. Opinion subsequently soured on the prospect of easy fortunes in torrid precincts, as Englishmen “fricased” by the oppressive heat of the West Indies turned their attention northward. In 1602, Edward Hayes promoted an expedition to Maine, declaring that “health of body and delyght” were a treasure more dear than gold mined from “burning zones” that, being “too vehement…for our bodies to endure,” would make “our complexions intemperat and contagiouse.” Even the Virginia icon John Smith, who previously regarded the low-lying and sickly Jamestown site “a verie fit place for the erecting of a great cittie,” had by 1625 shifted his colonial enthusiasm to healthier New England, where he promised fisheries would serve as an inexhaustible store of riches.14

In order to determine if men could thrive in Pennsylvania, Holme tried to read Indian bodies for clues to the environment. Penn subsequently lauded the inhabitants of his new province as being of “great shape, Strength and agility,” he was following in a well-established tradition. The Virginia Company had instructed its voyagers more than a half-century earlier to “Judge of the Good Air by the People, for some part of that coast where the lands are low, have their people blear eyed, and with swollen bellies and legs; but if the Naturals be strong and clean made it is a true sign of a wholesome soil.” In New England, Thomas Morton and others took the “perfect constitutions” of the men and women there as a sign that perhaps it would prove salutary for them as well. Carolina promoters promised settlers that in addition to economic advantage, they “may also expect…Prolongation of Life (as by observation upon the Native).”15 Elsewhere, some colonists saw catastrophic Indian mortality in the face of European disease as divine sanction for empire. Penn’s experience, and the broader effort to decipher Indian constitutions for signs of the atmospheric constitutions, demonstrate that indigenous vitality could likewise serve the imperial agenda. In the eyes of land-hungry settlers, Indian bodies—whether healthy or sick, living or dead—always justified further colonization.16

Penn’s interest in Holme’s survey was not solely invested in gathering accurate information but also in generating useful propaganda to assure potential supporters that Pennsylvania was healthy. Like Hayes and his pitch for colonizing Maine, promoters touted the alleged healthfulness of their proposed settlements, especially in comparison with rival colonies. Contending that the “Climate of Jersey is far more suitable to our Constitutions than that of Carolina,” one booster suggested that the paucity of news from the settlers there, could best be explained by “the death of the greatest part who went hence to that place.”17

Before Penn built his colony,...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. “A Rude Place and an Unpolisht Man”
• 2. “An Infancy of Government”
• 3. “A Suitable Charity or an Effectual Security”
• 4. “A Body Corporate and Politick”
• 5. “Improvement in Every Part of the Healing Art”
• 6. “A Fine Field for Professional Improvement”
• 7. “In a Yielding State”
• 8. “Those Friendly Reciprocities”
• 9. “A Matter of Police”
• Conclusion
• Notes