Much of New York's business life ceased abruptly. Throughout the eighteenth century, New York City had been repeatedly afflicted with many diseases including yellow fever, smallpox, measles, and diphtheria. Private individuals, groups, and charitable associations had long dominated the "public health" response to prior diseases. The Cholera epidemic would prove to be noticeably different.
In September of , as the City prepared for the anticipated arrival of cholera, the Board the Mayor, Aldermen, and City Recorder established a committee to gather information regarding the European epidemic; it also, along with the Health Officer appointed by the state, enforced an initial quarantine issued by the Mayor during the winter of In early June of , and in response to the public criticism, Mayor Walter Browne expanded the quarantine to against all peoples and products of Europe and Asia.
Eventually the quarantine prohibited ships from approaching closer than yards to the city; vehicles were ordered to stop 1. On June 4th a city ordinance was introduced promoting the cleaning of New York's legendary filthy streets; passed on June 13, the ordinance substantially reorganized New York's sanitation departments.
Much of the city's subsequent administration of its varied programs was overseen by these smaller "crisis management" committees. Despite its tardy start, the NYC Board of Health and its associated committees, did take several reasonably decisive actions regarding the management of cholera.
On June 17 the City approved the erection of several 5 temporary hospitals not including the Bellevue almshouse at various locations within the city. Streets, which had never been cleaned of the accumulation of several decades of excrement, dead animals, garbage, and other waste, were shoveled, swept, cleaned and covered with tons of chloride of lime quicklime.
The City's worst slums were evacuated. These newly indigent and homeless persons required the immediate rental of several buildings as well as supplies of food, clothing, and drugs. Temporary housings or shanties were erected in several places within the city.
Private persons, charitable associations, and churches established soup kitchens, paid the poor to clean streets, "purify" their own homes, or to perform other "make work" projects. Fortunately the City's finances were sufficient. No special appeals for private contributions were necessary; only city monies duly appropriated from the treasury were used, although thousands of private persons volunteered personal services to public programs.
New York was not a huge city in Of its , residents, it is estimated that as many as a third 80, fled to the country where they thought the chances of epidemic were lower. Others within the private sphere of New York City reacted with great bravery, courage, and professionalism. Prominent within that category were those physicians who did not flee, but rather stayed in the city and administered to the thousands of cholera victims.
A small group of medical practitioners emulated the British medical response and published a periodic newsletter during the epidemic. The Cholera Bulletin was published for only a few weeks during the summer of , but remains an extraordinary historical resource and window into the world of the cholera epidemic of Within a short time. The whole country was alarmed, and precautionary measures.
Among these communities the little city of Buffalo, with its seven or eight thousand people did what. By the time most New Yorkers had learned of the early June presence of cholera in Montreal, the disease had already commenced its movement not only into the Hudson River but also up the St. Lawrence through Quebec, Toronto, Kingston, and toward Buffalo. In addition to a strict quarantine along the Upper and Lower New York-Canadian frontier, it also ordered the many communities along the St.
Over the next several weeks, communities all over New York established local boards of public health. Within days of the June 21, "Public Health Law," local health officials, quarantines, and inspectors of nuisances were appointed.
Physicians and hotel keepers were ordered to report all suspected cases of cholera. Individuals were commanded to clean and purify properties. Persons maintaining "nuisances" were subjected to criminal prosecution. Allen were appointed and supervised by the Mayor, Dr. Ebenezer Johnson. John E. Steamboats were stopped until medical inspections of everyone aboard had occurred; stage coaches were halted at the edge of the city. Canal boats were met and inspected while "country people were kept at a safe distance outside by their own fears of the contagion.
One after another was stricken down, mostly among the more destitute, heedless, and imprudent, but occasionally the disease burst into the dwellings of the careful and more circumspect, and carried off its victims with awful suddenness.
The coffin makers and grave diggers were constantly at work; many people hurriedly packed their trunks and left the city, while others stood appalled, knowing not whether to go or stay. Cathare Wall, Aug. Fincle was an intemperate man, and just returned from Utica, where he had been for several days. During the early summer of , Utica's newspapers indicate a dynamic and vibrant city deeply involved in the local, regional, and national political-economic events of Andrew Jackson's veto of the bill re-chartering the National Bank created great interest.
Substantial sectional controversy existed regarding the Tariff; Senator Henry Clay was expected to lead the anti-Jackson campaign in the Presidential elections. But it was the dreaded approach and terror of cholera which truly dominated the news. In addition and at the same meeting, the Council granted Thomas Brennon's petition as City Scavenger for additional compensation. Over the next several weeks June-July , Utica newspapers indicated several deaths without a medical causation listed.
It is entirely possible that the cause of death was other than cholera but it is historically suspicious and likely that these late June and early July deaths may have been cholera related.
At the same time, the Common Council approved 1 pay raises for additional scavengers, 2 petitions for temporary hospital, and 3 reviewed prosecutions by the City Attorney against individuals for the maintenance of nuisances on their premises. Prior to August 14th, the cause for each death was treated circumspectly.
Such discretion was justified due to the tendency to associate cholera with the "intemperate and imprudent. Ostrom, and Miss Gainer, daughter of Mr. William Gainer, "cholera" was definitively and publicly acknowledged as the cause of death. Over the next several weeks between August-September , nearly a hundred obituary notices were published in Utica newspapers with the vast majority attributed to "death due to cholera. Doctors Goodwell, Coventry, Peckham, and McCraith resigned as a result of the Boards "interference with their professional duties.
Cozier, William Williams, J. Unlike New York City's municipal finances, the maintenance and popularity of the Board of Health and Utica's temporary hospital during the epidemic was also a matter of some public controversy. Petitions to the Utica Common Council for articles furnished, lumber procured, payment for drugs, clothes, and providing work for the local destitute were staggering to a small community.
The uncertainty of cholera's causation, its social and personal costs, and the care received at the community hospital by Utica's cholera victims eventually caused a mob of Utica Irish workmen to riot and attack the facility in the late summer. Surviving letters from persons residing near Utica depict the social and personal anxiety, fear, and terror felt by New Yorkers during the summer of In a letter dated mid July from Utica's Mary and O.
Williams to their son Othniel Williams in Salem, Massachusetts, his mother wrote ". What country in which the Cholera has once gained a footing did it ever entirely abandon? The cases in Utica are less numerous than they were at first and I think less fatal. They are yet from 6 to 12 daily and deaths from 2 to 6 which is indeed a large mortality considering the reduced population-nor is it confined to any particular class of people. It commenced among the most respectable and a full proportion of this class have died with it.
Kimball wrote his mother, Mrs. The people of Middleburgh share in the general alarm, and are making preparations through the board of health for its appearance, they are about having a temporary hospital erected which I think is a prudent measure-there has occurred one case about five miles above us in the Town of Fulton,. Ouseley probably knows that cholera is in America, but I should not think it will prove a very bad disease among a people so well fed and so clean.
We were told in Paris that the alarm, however, was very great, and that the people near the Canadas went armed to keep off the emigrants from Quebec and Montreal--particularly the Vermontese. Our last accounts are up to the 24th of June, and they say the malady is already abating among the Irish, who were principally affected.
Virtually every city along the Hudson, St. Lawrence, Lake Ontario, Lake Erie, Lake Champlain, and Erie Canal suffered in its turn despite the imposition of quarantines and the frantic efforts by local boards of health to "purify" and eliminate nuisances.
Cooperstown, New York is the county seat for Otsego County and is an interior New York county characterized then and now, by its great natural beauty, rustic farm life, and relative lack of industrial development.
Although Cooperstown is idyllically situated on James Fenimore Cooper's Glimmerglass Lake, and near the headwaters of the Susquehanna River, its geography was not such that vast numbers of travelers, tradesmen, newly arrived immigrants, and possible cholera carriers passed through its locale within short periods of time.
As a direct result, Cooperstown's cholera experience was noticeably different than the port and canal cities of New York State and from its own neighbors in the western part of Otsego County. Cooperstown's Freeman's Journal served dually as the local newspaper and also as the official legal publication for not only the Village of Cooperstown but also for many of Otsego County's rural townships during the summer of Its editorials, legal notices, and reports from other newspapers provide evidence of cholera's effects in a rural New York county.
In the June 18th issue of the Freeman's Journal , an excerpted news item from the Albany Advertiser noted the death of 42 emigrants from Ireland in Montreal from cholera: "Thus we have positive evidence that this dreaded disease has found its way across the Atlantic.
Fortunate will be our country be, if this fatal scourge shall not invade its territory and depopulate our cities and villages. We have since had accounts from those places of its extended, and extending ravage, particularly among the emigrants from Europe.
The disease was of a very malignant character, more than two thirds of the cases having proved fatal. He was left with a persistent cough which returned at various times throughout his life. In the autumn he contracted mumps and this left him somewhat deaf in his right ear, a problem which never improved. He wrote afterwards of his time at Rugby see for example [ 9 ] :- During my stay I made I suppose some progress in learning of various kinds, but none of it was done with love, and I spent an incalculable time in writing out impositions - this last I consider one of the chief faults of Rugby School.
I made some friends there He left Rugby in December and in the following May he travelled to the University of Oxford to make the necessary arrangements to begin his studies there. Things did not start very well for him, however, for there was a shortage of accommodation and he had to return to his parent's home in Croft and wait until accommodation could be arranged before starting his university studies.
On 24 January Dodgson returned to Oxford to live with the Rev. Jacob Ley, a friend of his father. Two days later his mother died suddenly at the age of 47 and again he had to return to Croft.
When he returned to Oxford he was filled with a determination to work hard so that he might win scholarships and become financially independent. He was able to mix social and cultural activities with hard work at mathematics and in November he was awarded a Boulter Scholarship worth 20 pounds a year. After receiving a Second Class in classics and a First Class in mathematics in December he was awarded a Fellowship of 25 pounds a year for life.
This came with the right to live in Christ Church College, but although there were no requirements to any further academic achievements, he was required to take Holy Orders and to remain unmarried. Dodgson's father was absolutely delighted with his son's success and, moreover, he himself had been made Canon of Ripon Cathedral in , going on to become Archdeacon of Richmond two years later.
This was the year when Dodgson completed his studies receiving a Third Class Degree in Classics but topping the list of those receiving First Class honours in mathematics by a good margin.
The challenges ahead were now the senior scholarship competition and he knew that success in that would almost certainly lead to his appointment as a lecturer in mathematics. At this point, however, the usually conscientious Dodgson became too taken up with leisure and cultural activities and failed to put in the necessary work at mathematics.
He did begin to take pupils, although not as an official university tutor, and this too must have taken much of his time. Disappointed with his own performance in the two scholarship examination papers on 22 March , and that on the morning of the following day, he gave up and did not turn up to sit the final paper on the afternoon of 23 March only two students did sit it. Of course he did not receive the scholarship and wrote in his diary see for example [ 9 ] :- It is tantalizing to think how easily I might have got it, if I had only worked properly during this term, which I fear I must consider as wasted.
However, I have now got a year before me, and with this past term as a lesson I mean to have read by next time, Integral Calculus, Optics and theory of light , Astronomy, and higher Dynamics. I record this resolution to shame myself with, in case March finds me still unprepared, knowing how many similar failures there have been in my life already.
He still had a hectic schedule, coaching pupils, and he also had, since February , an official appointment as sub-librarian at Christ Church. In another scholarship examination he again failed to win an award but then took on coaching fourteen pupils for the Mathematical Examiner.
This task see for example [ 9 ] During the summer of Dodgson taught at his father's school in Croft and by the time he returned to Oxford in October it was as a Mathematics Lecturer, the position that he had sought. It meant that he now did not need to take the scholarship examinations in March as he had planned. Dodgson remained at Christ Church, Oxford, lecturing on mathematics and writing treatises and guides for students until Although he took deacon's orders in , Dodgson was never ordained a priest, partly because he was afflicted with a stammer that made preaching difficult and partly, perhaps, because he had discovered other interests such as the theatre.
It seems likely, however, that as time went on he found it harder to accept the view that non-Christian were condemned and, as a man of great honesty, would therefore find the oaths he would be required to swear to become a priest unacceptable. Among Dodgson's hobbies was photography, at which he became highly proficient.
His interest began when visiting his uncle in , and at that time he took some photographs with his uncle's equipment. He purchased his own camera and developing chemicals in March and began to experiment with pictures of landscapes, architecture, sculptures and, most of all, of people.
His family, friends and colleagues became the subjects of his photographs but he excelled especially at photographing children, which was his greatest pleasure. Alice Liddell, one of the three daughters of Henry George Liddell, the dean of Christ Church, was one of his photographic subjects and the model for the fictional Alice.
Other subjects were the children of the writer George Macdonald and the sons of the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Not only did Dodgson enjoy photographing children, but he also enjoyed their company. In Alice Liddell recalled how she and her sisters Lorina and Edith He seemed to have an endless store of these fantastical tales, which he made up as he told them, drawing busily on a large sheet of paper all the time.
They were not always entirely new. Sometimes they were new versions of old stories; sometimes they started on the old basis, but grew into new tales owing to the frequent interruptions which opened up fresh and undreamed-of possibilities.
It was in that Dodgson wrote down the stories at Alice's request. Henry Kingsley, the author, visited the Liddells and happened to pick up Dodgson's stories.
He made it very clear that Dodgson had to be persuaded to publish his writings. Three years later, after polishing them and adding some more material, Dodgson published his first "Alice book" as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. As a mathematician, Dodgson was rather conservative but certainly thorough and careful. None of his mathematics books have proved of enduring importance except for Euclid and his modern rivals which is of historical interest.
Dodgson wrote it to defend using Euclid 's Elements as a means of teaching geometry. The book is written in the form of a play in which the ghost of Euclid returns to defend his book to modern geometers.
Euclid sums up saying:- Let me carry with me the hope that I have convinced you of the importance, if not the necessity, of retaining my order and numbering, and my method of treating straight lines, angles, right angles, and most especially parallels. Leave me these untouched, and I shall look on with great contentment while other changes are made It is a serious work with well argued cases on all sides regarding the teaching of geometry.
It contains much evidence of Dodgson's humour too as for example after the ghost of Euclid makes his first appearance he leaves saying If you had any slow music handy, I would vanish to it: as it is As a mathematical logician, he was interested in increasing understanding by treating it as a game.
In the latter work Dodgson presented a way of visually representing propositions in a diagram which is similar to Venn diagrams, developed by John Venn in , but Dodgson's pictures have certain advantages. However, Venn diagrams are today much used and Dodgson's gameboard method is forgotten.
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