Contagious City

Simon Finger

Description

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.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Pensilvania
• Local history
• Pennsylvania
• History of medicine
• History of the Americas
• Pennsylvanie

Informations

• Publié par: Cornell University Press
• Date de parution: 03 mai 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780801464003
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

TheContagiousCity

TheContagiousCity

ThePoliticsofPublicHealth in Early Philadelphia

SimonFinger

CornellUniversityPress ithaca and london

Copyright ©2012by Cornell University

Allrightsreserved.Exceptforbriefquotationsinareview,thisbook,orpartsthereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House,512East State Street, Ithaca, New York14850.

Firstpublished2012by Cornell University Press

PrintedintheUnitedStatesofAmerica

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data

Finger, Simon,1977–  The contagious city : the politics of public health in early Philadelphia / Simon Finger.  p. cm.  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN9780801448935(cloth : alk. paper)  1health—Political aspects—Pennsylvania—Philadelphia—History—. Public 18th century.2diseases—Political aspects—Pennsylvania—Philadelphia—. Communicable History—18th century.3. Social medicine—Pennsylvania—Philadelphia—History—18th century.4. Philadelphia (Pa.)—Politics and government—18th century. I. Title.  RA448.P45F56 2012 362.109748'11—dc232011051729

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Clothprinting

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Formyparents

Hencethereadersees—andwhocanwonder,thatmedicineand politics were mixed together in a young, ardent and anxious brain, far distant from his suffering country!

—Benjamin Waterhouse,An Essay on Junius and His Letters,1831

Contents

Prefaceix Acknowledgmentsxiii

 Introduction: Epidemic Constitutions1

1. “A Rude Place and an Unpolisht Man”: William Penn and the Nature of Pennsylvania7 2. “An Infancy of Government”: Population, Authority, and the Problem of Proprietorship21 3. “A Suitable Charity or an Effectual Security”: Community, Contagion, and the Care of Strangers33 4. “A Body Corporate and Politick”: Association, Interest, and Improvement in a Provincial City57 5. “Improvement in Every Part of the Healing Art”: Transatlantic Cultures of Medical Improvement76 6. “A Fine Field for Professional Improvement”: Sites and Sources of Medical Authority in the Revolutionary War86 7a Yielding State”: Nervous Nationalism in the. “In New Republic103 8Friendly Reciprocities”: Panic and Participation in. “Those the Age of Yellow Fever120 9. “A Matter of Police”: Fever and Betrayal in the Federal Union135

Conclusion: Looking West from Philadelphia153

Notes163 Index219

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Preface

WhenIbegantheworkthatwouldbecomeThe Contagious City,I was try ing to solve a problem of collective action: How do communities respond to shared dangers? I did not want to plow the wellfurrowed ground of Indian European conflict or imperial rivalry, and after some consideration I realized that disease presented a threat that easily rivaled tomahawk and musket ball. Although colonial planners and settlers shared a sense that disease was a common hazard and health a common goal, they differed dramatically in their understanding of how best to confront contagion and promote well ness. Few colonies illustrate that rift so vividly as Pennsylvania. The dream of protecting health on a collective level molded its capital at Philadelphia and the settler empire that took shape in North America. Colonial, provin cial, and national societies all depended on the creation and mobilization of population to create a community and fuel an economy. Thebattleoverpublichealthwasakeystonetothepoliticsofempire, 1 but it has not always been understood as such.Until the middle of the twentieth century, American medical historiography was largely dominated by an antiquarian bent and pointedly apolitical perspective that encom 2 passed both general surveys and local case studies.Even thereafter, many works continued to isolate medical development from wider social currents, although works by Whitfield Bell and Charles Rosenberg, among others, 3 began to integrate American medicine with its social context.Meanwhile, W. B. Bynum, Roy Porter, and fellow British scholars recovered stories of the medical enlightenment that restored its political content. Adrian Wilson has referred to this scholarship as history of medicine with the politics put 4 back in. OrthodoxhistoriansofAmericanpublichealthhavefocusedalmostex clusively on the development of formal institutions of sanitation and public relief. Although this literature has allowed for a modicum of institutional de velopment in the colonial era, and even offered a political framework for its emergence, scholars have generally interpreted these measures as moments

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