Necropolis by Kathryn Olivarius

Author:Kathryn Olivarius
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

Sanitation

Even though quarantines were too controversial to seriously consider, sanitation schemes like swamp drainage, street cleaning, and garbage removal could find bipartisan support. Such programs were cheaper than quarantine, and sanitarians also genuinely believed that suppressing miasmas and sweetening “foul airs” were crucial to disease prevention. Historian Melanie Kiechle has noted that according to nineteenth-century science, miasmas were the literal cause of illness. If a woman covered her nose while walking past a reeking abattoir or while descending into a dank cellar, this was not just a reflex—it was prophylactic. Visitors to New Orleans made a point of commenting on the city’s uncommon filthiness and smelliness, noting that the swamps behind town emitted foul vapors; that the levee was trash-strewn; and that streets were indistinguishable from latrines after a light rainfall. The city’s natural low-lying condition—combined with its heat and filth—created dangerous conditions.64

Early in the American Period, New Orleans’s residents complained that the stench was unbearable—and the city council took steps, albeit small ones, to improve conditions. After several citizens protested in June 1804, for example, that the barges waiting in port were “injurious” to health because of “the putrid miasmes emanating” from “decomposing foodstuffs or … the filth of animals on board,” the city council resolved that all barges carrying food and animals must unload above Poydras Street (uptown) or below the city’s shipyard fronting the French Quarter. Violations would merit a $10 fine. The council also mandated that butchers remove all accumulated “blood, excrements, horns with bits of flesh, in fact all filth” from their shops and throw it into the Mississippi to prevent “very contagious diseases.” Officials laced sausage with poison to kill rabid dogs and paid enslaved workmen to remove the canines’ carcasses. It also barred soldiers from defecating on the river bank, which had offered “at once a spectacle of the most revolting indecency and nastiness” and also worsened “public health.”65

But as the city’s population swelled, so did the city’s abounding filth. This became increasingly hard to ignore, even for those with the most ironclad stomachs.66 Garbage and sewage were produced much faster than they could be removed. By 1851, Dr. E. H. Barton had estimated that New Orleans’s 130,000 residents produced 5,633 tons of sewage and 43,000 tons of urine each year. Animals produced a further 50,000 tons of waste. And if the 3,000 dead bodies interred each year were added to the weight of “organic matter submitted to the putrefactive fermentation,” this made for a whopping 150,000 tons of organic waste, within an area of 7.25 square miles. All this organic waste contaminated the purity of the air New Orleanians breathed, poisoned the water they drank, and caused epidemics. British sociologist Harriet Martineau described New Orleans as “peculiarly unhealthy” compared to all the other cities she had visited on her American tour in the 1830s. She was distressed to hear that parents would only let their children play outdoors if the wind was blowing in from Lake Pontchartrain. Otherwise, the air was too dangerous to breathe.

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