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The Public Health

About This Item

  • Title: The Public Health
  • Date: 23 July 1858
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: per.00808
  • Source: Brooklyn Daily Times, 23 July 1858: 2. Our transcription is based on a digital image of a microfilm scan of the original issue. Microfilm of original issue held at Pennsylvania State University Libraries. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the journalism, see our statement of editorial policy.
  • Editorial note: This piece is unsigned, as was the case for most of Whitman's journalism. However, this editorial is part of a series of texts that deal with a coherent theme that has been identified by the Whitman Archive journalism team as likely authored by Whitman. This decision is based on a combination of historical and (auto)biographical accounts, similarity to contemporary Whitman writings, a history of scholarly attribution, extant clippings retained by Whitman, computational stylometric analysis, and, in some cases, manuscript evidence in Whitman’s hand.
  • Contributors to digital file: Joe Stouffer Kaylen Michaelis Brandi Faulkner Stefan Schöberlein Karie Cobb
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "The Public Health." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 16 July 2024. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: per.00808.xml (TEI)
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THE PUBLIC HEALTH.

Thus far we have been remarkably favored during the present season. Our city has been healthy beyond a parallel, and, as yet, none of the diseases of summer have been developed to any extent. The fatal epidemics incident to warm weather have passed us over this time, so far, at least, and our bills of mortality show an eminently favorable state of the public health.

It will not do, however, to be neglectful and repose in fancied security. There is plenty of time yet next month for disease to make its appearance in our midst, and our city authorities will be culpably neglectful if they do not use all the means in their power to guard against the contingent danger. Some of our streets, especially in this section of the city, are disgracefully filthy, and in the hot sun are redolent of anything else than spicy odors. Some neighborhoods, also, on the North side, not to mention several localities a little further South, are reeking with filth, and need only a spark of contagion to create a blaze. These things should be attended to in time, if we would not be criminally negligent of the interests of the sanitary interests of our city.

Setting aside the usual summer diseases, the physicians do not find their occupation flourish. Meantime, however, they cannot help sympathising in the general cheerful tone of the public,—a cheerfulness occasioned by the absence of the great weight of anxiety which always pervades the community at the approach of epidemics. May the present good heaith​ of our city long continue—and in expressing this wish, we respectfully assure our excellent friends, the doctors, that we sympathise with them as much as we do with other classes of the community who are affected by "dull times" in business.

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