The City That Was


Lu par David Wales

(4 stars; 3 reviews)

This 1911 history of the public health revolution that transformed New York City in the nineteenth century is also about every city and town of the world and the sanitary challenges that each encountered. Stephen Smith (1823-1922) was an American surgeon and a pioneer in public health. “The story of a great life-saving social revolution, the mightiest in the nineteenth century and one of the most momentous in the history of civilization, is told here for the first time. It is told from the standpoint of the transformation of the City of New York, by a chief actor in the event.” Chapter four, New York The Unclean, is the heart of this work. ( Publisher's Note and David Wales) (3 hr 53 min)

Chapitres

Publisher's Note 3:12 Lu par David Wales
A Blind Metropolis And Her Dying Children 7:05 Lu par David Wales
A Great Awakening In England 7:32 Lu par David Wales
The Awakening In America 20:18 Lu par David Wales
New York The Unclean Part 1 39:08 Lu par David Wales
New York The Unclean Part 2 38:17 Lu par David Wales
New York The Unclean Part 3 48:08 Lu par David Wales
Victory 6:39 Lu par David Wales
The Legal Work of Dorman Bridgeman Eaton 27:23 Lu par David Wales
The Occult Power Of Filth 31:56 Lu par David Wales
A Closing Word 3:25 Lu par David Wales

Critiques

Ripped From The Headlines...


(5 stars)

...the headlines of the New York Post of the 1860's, that is! I gave this book five stars primarily because of the extreme timeliness. All over the world right now, we're moving out of the first phase of "social distancing" and "shelter in place" toward a cautious reopening of our businesses and homes. This book describes how a largely voluntary group of citizens and doctors spent six months--May through November--visiting every single building in New York City: interviewing residents, sketching apartments, documenting geographic features that might affect drainage, inspecting privies, wading through sewage overflows. In the end, they amassed and analyzed more than 400 pages of data on the appalling conditions in which half the population of New York, half a million people, lived. And then they took that information and fought Boss Tweed's machine and the partisan politics in the New York legislature for years, using the power of the press and the truth of evidence based medicine .