Part 14

As the City Inspector with his health wardens always appeared at Albany when a health bill was before the Legislature, denying vociferously the alleged unsanitary condition of the city, Mr. Eaton advised that the Association make a careful inspection of the city with its own inspectors. This inspection was organized by the Council of Hygiene and prosecuted during the summer of 1864 by young physicians, and was the most exhaustive study of the sanitary condition ever made of a city, even by officials. The results were published in a large volume which has been pronounced by authorities at home and abroad as equal to the best official reports of European cities.

The bill was early introduced into the Legislature of 1865. In due time it came before a joint committee of both houses, with Senator Andrew D. White in the chair. The City Inspector, with his health wardens, was present, and a large attendance of members with several prominent citizens of New York. At Mr. Eaton’s request I described the deplorable sanitary condition of the city as revealed by our inspections and explained the medical features of the bill. He followed with a brilliant and exhaustive speech on the nature of sanitary legislation and the value to cities of adequate health laws administered by well-organized boards of health.

At the conclusion of the hearing the members of the committee assured us that if the two houses were in session they would pass the bill at once. But we were doomed to disappointment. The City Inspector secured delays, and meantime employed through his agents the means at his command to defeat the bill. The agitation, however, was continued during the year, chiefly through the New York Times, then under the management of Mr. Raymond, an ardent reformer.

Mr. Eaton advised the Medical Council to interest the physicians of the country, and especially urge them not to nominate men who had voted against the bill in the last Legislature. This plan was carried out, and seventeen former members failed of renomination to the Assembly. The result of this scheme succeeded admirably, for the new Legislature was to some extent pledged to support the bill when they came to the capitol. The bill promptly passed both houses early in the session of 1866, and in March the Metropolitan Board of Health was organized. Mr. Eaton accepted the position of counsellor to the board, which position he retained several years.

As he had anticipated, a suit against the Board was early commenced to test the constitutionality of the law. He was very apprehensive of the results, and made the most thorough preparation to argue the case. He was successful in the lower courts, and finally won in the Court of Appeals by a majority of one. He always regarded his success in the management of this case as one of the most important events of his life, for on the decision of the highest court depended the fate of health legislation in this country.

No one unfamiliar with the sanitary condition of this city prior to 1864 can form any adequate conception of the enormous benefits conferred, not only upon this metropolis, but upon the entire country, by the labors of Mr. Eaton and his associates in securing to it the Metropolitan Health Law. During the former period New York was a prey to every form of pestilence known to man. Smallpox, the most preventable of contagious diseases, was epidemic in this city every five years, and created a large death-rate among the children. Scarlet fever and diphtheria spread through the city without the slightest effort on the part of the officials to control them. Cholera visited us once in ten years without any adequate measures of prevention. The mortality was greater than of any other city of a civilized country, it being estimated that 7,000 died yearly from preventable diseases.

The tenement-house population lived under the most unhealthy and degrading conditions, a prey to greedy landlords, and without any possible relief or redress. In one notorious building, which covered an ordinary city lot, were fifty families, with a total population of five hundred persons.

Here every form of domestic pestilence could be found at all seasons of the year. Still more deplorable was the condition of the tenants of cellars. Of these so-called “Troglodytes” there were 5,000 living in rooms the ceilings of which were below the level of the surface of the street.

To the present generation it may appear incredible that there was neither law, ordinance, nor department of the city government capable of giving the slightest relief. This was illustrated in an attempt to break up a fever nest in 1860. The landlord refused to make the slightest repairs, or cleansing, in a tenement house from which upwards of one hundred cases of fever have been removed to the hospital.

The attorney to the Police Department was unable to find any law or ordinance by which he could be compelled to cleanse, repair, or vacate the house. It was only by confronting him in court, to which he had been brought on a fictitious charge, with a reporter, that he was induced to take any steps to improve the tenement.

Now everything relating to the public health is so changed that it is almost impossible to realize the condition of the city in 1866. The change began with the very organization of the Metropolitan Board. Within a few days of that event, cholera, which had devastated portions of Europe, made its appearance in this city; but it met with a far different reception than that of former visitations. The first case was quarantined within an hour of its occurrence; the clothing of the patient was destroyed, the room disinfected, and a sanitary guard placed over the house. No other case appeared in that quarter of the city. There were several similar outbreaks in different parts of the town, but each was treated with the same vigilance and energy, and the contagion never secured a foothold in the city or the metropolitan district.

Though cholera has since appeared in Europe at its usual intervals, and has several times been at our doors, it has not been able to invade the city for a period of thirty-four years. Smallpox, which once decimated the child population every five years, has not been epidemic in a whole generation. Diphtheria and the whole brood of domestic pestilences are diminishing in frequency and fatality. Even consumption, so common and fatal among the poor, is rapidly disappearing in consequence of the improved condition of the tenement houses.

And what a vast change has been made in the homes of the poor! No human habitation is underground; the ancient rookery, with its five hundred inhabitants, is a past number; the dark, foul courts are disappearing, and in their places have arisen the modern tenements, with their light, airy, and cheerful apartments, and all the conditions necessary to family health and domestic happiness. The laws and ordinances all conspire to compel the landlords to remedy every defect on complaint of the tenant; the penalty being that the latter need not pay rent until the home is made habitable in a sanitary sense. The vital statistics show that human life is lengthening in this city, and that the entire metropolis is more healthy as a place of residence than the surrounding country towns.

But the beneficent results of the labors of Mr. Eaton and his associates in the field of sanitary legislation are not confined to New York. As he predicted, the Metropolitan Health Law became the basis of sanitary legislation throughout the country. At the time of its enactment the municipalities of the United States were as destitute of health laws and regulations as the City of New York. To-day there is not a city, or even village, that has not its laws and ordinances relating to the preservation and promotion of the public health based on the original law drawn by Mr. Eaton. And the same remark is true of the organized health administration of the States of the Union, for on analysis it will be found that their sanitary legislation is in harmony with the provisions of that law. Mr. Eaton’s work was broad and fundamental.

At that period the old Volunteer Fire Department was quite as discreditable to the city as was its health organization. Intrenched in the political organizations of the city, it wielded a power second only to that of the great political parties themselves. It required the strength and courage of a Hercules to purify this department by removing the existing elements, reconstructing the entire organization, substituting a paid for a volunteer membership, and requiring a high grade of qualification of its officers.

But, aided by the Citizens’ Association, Mr. Eaton undertook this reform, and after a fierce and prolonged struggle carried it to a successful conclusion. The law creating the fire department, like that creating the health department, is a model of intelligent discrimination of all the conditions essential to the efficiency of the service and its permanent freedom from the vices inherent in the old system.

Scarcely had these reforms been perfected when Mr. Eaton’s attention was turned by the Citizens’ Association to the necessity of having a department in the city government devoted exclusively to the care and management of the public docks, wharves, and other water-front interests of the city. This movement resulted in the passage of the law drawn by Mr. Eaton creating the Department of Docks. Though this Department was to occupy an entirely new field in the Municipal Administration, the law shows in every section the same mastery of all the details peculiar to Mr. Eaton’s legislative work.

Finally, Mr. Eaton undertook, single-handed, to reform the police judiciary. He prepared a bill creating the civil magistrates to take the place of the police justices and reforming in many particulars the methods of procedure. This law is regarded as a great improvement upon the previous police judiciary, but the bill became a law only after a protracted struggle with the old police justices, a struggle which Mr. Eaton maintained alone, relying upon the merits of the measure which he advocated. The consensus of opinion of legal authorities is that the new law effected radical reforms of great importance in these inferior courts of criminal jurisprudence in New York City.

If we may estimate Mr. Eaton’s mental traits by the laws which he drafted in the interests of municipal reform, we can readily conclude that he had a remarkable genius for constructive legislation. Though he was compelled to weave into the very woof of those laws, extraordinary powers, which he acknowledged were of vital importance to their efficiency, and yet would be a menace to the public, if the laws were administered by unscrupulous persons, he succeeded in so guarding those powers that these laws have been in operation upwards of a quarter of a century; and, while those who have from time to time been called to administer them have not always had the best reputation for intelligence and civic virtue, yet there has at no time been any complaint of injustice in their execution, nor has there been any serious lapse in their vigorous enforcement. To-day, as a generation ago, they are accomplishing the full measure of usefulness for which they were designed by their author.

Standing now at the close of a life so largely devoted to the service of his fellow-men and consecrated to the amelioration of human suffering, and where we may, in some slight degree, estimate the vast and ever-increasing fruition of its labors, how sublime it appears! Monuments and memorials can but faintly symbolize its greatness and perpetuate its enduring force. Mr. Eaton’s own thought of true fame once was expressed to me thus: “I ask only to be remembered as one who in his sphere of life’s duties endeavored to improve the conditions of human life around him.”

VII

THE OCCULT POWER OF FILTH

In the retrospect from the vantage ground of half a century of sanitary progress we recognize that during the third quarter of the last century the people of England were waging a successful war on domestic uncleanliness as a contributory, if not the sole cause of epidemic diseases. The health officer of England insisted that domestic filth was the actual cause of many of the low forms of disease, and named them accordingly, “filth diseases.” This official act of the highest health authority of that country led to the practice of cleanliness in the home and its surroundings. Filth in every form was removed as the necessary remedial measure against these diseases, with the result that not only were foreign pestilences prevented, but the whole brood of domestic diseases was greatly reduced in number, and the severity of cases that did occur was greatly diminished in virulence.

But during the fourth quarter of the last century the question arose among scientists, “Why is filth--that is, decomposing matter--the prolific cause of disease?” The answer came from the famous Pasteur of Paris, and Lister of Edinburgh. “Filth is dangerous, because it is filled with germ life. The mere removal of filth from one locality to another does not render it harmless, except to those who are no longer in personal contact with it.” So-called filth was indeed harmless if the germs it contained were killed.

The whole scheme of sanitation was at once changed: agents that would kill germs were eagerly sought by many scientists, and germicides were found in abundance. Cremation was most effectful, and was available in the destruction of masses of filth; but there was a phase of the question that required other methods.

Lister announced that these disease-producing germs entered wounds and prevented healing, and that a germicide was required which would kill the germ in the wound and would not injure the living, healthy tissue. Further investigations showed that these dangerous germs were not confined to dust heaps, but existed in the unclean recesses of the human body.

Sternberg startled the world with the announcement that an unclean human mouth contained germs of the most poisonous character.

An eminent German surgeon declared that germs of a dangerous character existed in the folds of the skin of the palms of the hand which no amount of washing with soap and water could remove, and could be destroyed only by some agent directly applied.