Health of the City

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The Health of the City.

The annual report of Dr. Samuel Boyd, Health Officer, for the year 1858, has appeared in pamphlet form.¹ We desire emphatically to call the attention of the Common Council to its recommendations—the following especially, The Health Department needs reorganisation—a standing Sanitary Commission of some kind should be created, instead of the ridiculous summer farce of the Board of Health. The alderman have been relieved from many of their minor duties, and ought now to devote more time to the sanitary and social conditions of the city. It is disgraceful to our civilization and necessarily productive of disease in the hot weather, that the streets should be kept, as many of them are, knee deep in refuse, garbage, and slops, emptied from crowded tenement houses. While ashes are carefully carted away far more obnoxious and filthy matter is suffered to accumulate in the streets. The Health Officer remarks—

"As one of the most important subjects in connection with that of mortality, I give precedence to this. The efforts to keep our streets in a proper condition must prove abortive unless and effectual check is place upon the systematic habits of a portion of our population, to cast their garbage, slops, and offal, promiscuously in front of their residences."

Tenement houses, packed from basement to attic with humans beings, are precisely those which need the most rigid surveillance, but it would indeed be a herculean task without some restrictive aid to keep them in a state of semi-cleanliness. Custom has almost sanctioned the use of the streets as a receptacle for filth, and alike ignorant or reckless of consequences, the practice exists to the manifest abridgment of comfort, health and life. From streets, alley-ways and courts, the poisonous gases of putrifying animal and vegetable matter mingle with the atmosphere, to the injury of all sections of the city, and all classes of society. Here epidemic finds a foothold, and death the greatest number of its victims. The regular collections of the ash carts do much to promote cleanliness in these quarters, but as I have already stated, summary punishment of the offenders would do much more.

"I would also urgently direct your attention to the boxes kept on the side-walks as receptacles of garbage; faulty in construction, deficient in numbers, they are, as now, a nuisance rather than a beneficial convenience—and in these respects, as well as capacity, location and right to use, I would suggest the utility of a regulative ordinance."

In dismissing the Dr.'s report, we were about to repeat the eulogy which we had already bestowed on it, as a careful and valuable compendium of information and suggestions, when our attention was called to an apparent similarity between it and the report of Dr. Cleveland, last year. On comparison we find evidence of the most barefaced plagiarism. Dr. Boyd has, with an effrontery only equalled by the dishonesty of such a course, abstracted whole paragraphs from the report of his predecessor, and palmed them off on the Common Council and the public as his own This fact does not detract from the value of the recommendation themselves, but it certainly exonerates Dr. Boyd from whatever credit might otherwise have been bestowed upon him.

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