The first case of cholera was promptly isolated, the house and its surroundings cleansed and disinfected, and rigid supervision established. The second case, which appeared in another part of the city, was treated in a similar manner and with the same results. A third, fourth, fifth, and finally many cases appeared in different parts of the city during the season, apparently brought from localities in the vicinity where the epidemic prevailed with its usual severity; but in New York no two cases occurred in the same place, so effectually was each case treated.
Within one month public confidence in the power of the board to control the spread of the disease was firmly established; people who had fled returned to their homes; business in commercial districts, which was at first suspended, was resumed; and the health department became the most popular branch of the city government, a position which it has maintained uninterruptedly for nearly half a century.
This popular triumph of sanitation is largely due to the perfection of the original Metropolitan Law, which has been declared, officially and judicially, to be the most complete piece of health legislation ever placed on the statute books. From that The Reform National
in Its Results fountain of legal lore the whole country has been supplied with both the principles and the details of sanitary legislation.
The agitation in New York rapidly extended over the entire country, and other cities secured the necessary authority, the Metropolitan Law being the basis of such health legislation. Within a decade nearly every municipality in the land had its health laws and sanitary ordinances and a competent authority to enforce them.
The enormous influence which this reform has had upon the health and domestic life of the people can never be estimated. A reference to the former and present sickness and death-rates of New York enables us to approximate the vast saving of life and consequent prevention of sickness and human misery that has resulted from health laws founded on the Metropolitan Law and intelligently but rightly enforced. Before the passage of that law the annual death-rate of the city fluctuated between 28 and 40 per 1,000 population; since that law went into effect it has steadily fallen until it has reached the low figure of fifteen to the thousand, or a saving of more than twenty thousand lives annually when the population of New York was only about one million, and of nearly 10,000 lives of the present population. If we extend this estimate to the whole country, of ninety-five million people, we may gain a faint conception of the inestimable benefits which the application of sanitary knowledge to the daily life of a people can accomplish.
VI
The Legal Work of Dorman Bridgeman Eaton
The following chapter consists of the address delivered by Dr. Stephen Smith on the occasion of the memorial service of Hon. Dorman B. Eaton, January 21, 1899. We have inserted it immediately following his historic review of the events which led up to the great public health reform of 1865–1866, not only because it is a fitting tribute to the memory of one to whom the citizens of New York are indebted for many improvements in the administration of the municipal government, but because it brings together in one compact perspective the legal and sanitary requirements of modern preventive medicine.—F. A.
