A NEW DEPARTURE
THE health campaigns of the last forty-five years divide themselves naturally into two groups, those that came before 1900 and those that came after that year. The early campaigns were the more obvious; the later campaigns are the more subtle in their tactics, but none the less effective. Before 1900 the death-rate had been reduced by more than one third. In 1866 it was 34 per thousand; in 1900 it was 20.57 per thousand. During this period of thirty-four years wells had been gradually eliminated as sources of drinking-water, until not one was left in the principal parts of the city. Young children who never had been in the country were brought to the well in Central Park and they gazed into it as a curiosity, just as they looked at the bears and the greenhouses. At the same time the general water-supply was vastly improved. To live in cellars was made illegal, and there was a general improvement in the condition of dwellings. Street-cleaning became well organized; sewers were laid in almost all the streets, and refuse was cared for scientifically. The public supervision of contagious diseases became effective; good use was made of new medical discoveries, such as diphtheria antitoxin, and the public hospitals were improved.
Yet the advances in sanitary safeguarding since 1900 are more wonderful than those that came before. In the last twelve years the death-rate has been reduced by a quarter from its comparatively high rate at the beginning of the century. In 1911 it was 15.13 per thousand. For 1912 it was 14.11 per thousand. However, this reduction of more than six per thousand has been won with over twice the effort that was necessary to make the first fourteen per thousand. The city budget for 1912 carried an appropriation for the Department of Health of more than $3,000,000. As much more was spent the same year by the seventy-odd organizations, private or semi-public, the purpose of which is the betterment of health conditions. Besides, there has been the devoted labor of more than seven thousand physicians.
In all this vast field of effort, as diversified as the entire scope of modern science, as complex as civilization itself, two main lines stand out conspicuously. New York was a pioneer among cities in both. These concerned the treatment of tuberculosis and children’s diseases. The organized fight against tuberculosis in New York, under the latest approved scientific methods, dates only from 1904. Before that time there was no successful effort on the part of the authorities to diagnose the disease properly, nor any attempt to deal with it intelligently when it was discovered accidentally. Yet New York is as great a sufferer from the white plague as any other locality. Its congested living, its large Negro population, and its indigent foreigners, ignorant of our language and customs, make it a fertile breeding-ground for the tubercle bacillus.
Within eight years, twenty-nine tuberculosis clinics have been established, and several day camps have been built where sufferers can recuperate without expense and without leaving the city. In all these thorough blood and sputum tests are made with modern scientific apparatus. At the same time, it has been widely made known that to recover from the dread disease it is not necessary to leave the city, which, situated between two bodies of water, is swept constantly by fresh air, the chief necessity in the treatment of tuberculosis.