A research on disease and poor housing during the early days of the twentieth century

Malthus and welfare revisited Did poor relief in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when payments were increased according to family size, encourage early and improvident marriage and thereby undermine the preventive check and lead to excessive population growth?

Edward Livingston Trudeau Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau was the first American to promote isolation as a means not only to spare the healthy, but to heal the sick. Trudeau believed that a period of rest and moderate exercise in the cool, fresh air of the mountains was a cure for tuberculosis.

When he was nineteen, Trudeau watched his older brother die of TB, an experience that convinced him to become a physician.

Injust a year after leaving medical school, he, too, contracted tuberculosis. Faced with what he believed to be a sure and speedy death, Trudeau left his medical practice in New York City and set off for his favorite resort in the Adirondacks to die.

Experiments on tubercular rabbits in his lab at the cottage seemed to verify his belief. In February ofTrudeau welcomed the first group of hopeful patients to his sanatorium in the woods. Trudeau required his guests to follow a strict regimen of diet and exercise. They were given three meals every day, and a glass of milk every four hours.

Trudeau and his staff encouraged their patients to spend as much time as possible outdoors. At first, this meant extended periods of sitting on the sanatorium veranda the open-air porch was a standard feature of Trudeau-style sanatoriums. Gradually, patients spent more time walking than sitting, until they were able to spend 8 to 10 hours per day exercising outdoors, regardless of weather.

Bywhat started as a single red cottage was a small village, a building complex that included a library, a chapel, and an infirmary.

Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death: BasicBooks,; Richard H. Shryock, National Tuberculosis Association, NTA, Mark Caldwell, The Last Crusade: The War on Consumption, New York: Atheneum,Unlike the urban planning profession in the early twentieth century, which called for large-scale demolition projects of buildings and streets, the housing reform movement Thwing participated in urged proper maintenance and renovation of existing structures along with construction of new model tenements.

Only a few social workers and city planners made attempts to deal with the problems of slums, poverty, and poor housing. In an important reversal of policy, the Roosevelt administration involved the federal government directly in construction programs. As early as the s, poverty, crime, disease, ignorance, and alcohol addiction thrived.

The history of the public health system is a history of bringing knowledge and values together in the public arena to shape an approach to health problems. Before the Eighteenth Century Throughout recorded history, epidemics such as the plague, cholera, and smallpox evoked sporadic public efforts to protect citizens in the face of a dread disease.

Nov 01,  · Before considering changes which took place in mental hospital clothing during the twentieth century, it is worth recalling that the making, repair and cleaning of clothes provided a major source of employment for patients as well as staff from the early days of these institutions.

Deprivation and Disease in Early Twentieth-Century America Karen Clay, Werner Troesken.

• American Literary History
• PhD projects
• A History of the Public Health System - The Future of Public Health - NCBI Bookshelf

NBER Working Paper No. Issued in March NBER Program(s):Aging, Health Economics, Development of the American Economy This paper explores how early life exposure to poverty and want adversely affects later life health outcomes. This paper attempts to fill in gaps in both historical and community level data by describing infant mortality in an Aboriginal community in Canada for a period of thirty years at the beginning of .