Stephen Smith
speaker
1,482 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 23 Jul
Stephen Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
of streets and dwellings, thus causing soakage of large areas of land and stagnant pools of polluted water.
Later, in these centuries of neglect of sanitary precautions, came the immigrants from every nation of the world, representing for the most part, the poorest and most ignorant class of their respective nationalities.
This influx of people led to the construction of the tenement house by landowners whose aim was to build so as to incur the least possible expense and accommodate the greatest.
Greatest possible number in dark, unventilated, uninhabitable structures, these wretched, persecuted people were herded together in cellars and garrets, as well as in the body of the building, until New York had the largest population to a square acre of any civilized city.
The people had not only chosen to conserve all the natural conditions unfavorable to health, but had steadily added unhygienic factors to their methods of developing the city.
The result was inevitable.
New York gradually became the natural home of every variety of contagious disease, and the favorite resort of foreign pestilences.
Smallpox, scarlet fever, measles, diphtheria, were domestic pestilences with which the people were so familiar that they regarded them as necessary features of childhood.
Malarial fevers caused by the mosquitoes bred in the marshes, which were perfect culture beds, were regularly announced in the autumnal months as having appeared with their usual severity.
The white plague or consumption was the common inheritance of the poor and rich alike.
With the immigrant came typhus and typhoid fevers which resistlessly swept through the tenement houses, decimating the poverty stricken tenants.
At intervals the great oriental plague, Asiatic cholera, swooped down upon the city with fatal energy and gathered its enormous harvest of dead.
Even yellow fever, the great pestilence of the tropics, made occasional incursions and found a most congenial field for its operations.
Failure to improve the unhealthy conditions of the city and the tendency to aggravate them by a large increase of the tenement house population, offensive trades, accumulations of domestic waste, and the filth of streets, stables, and privy pits, then universal caused an enormous sacrifice of life, especially among children.
This fact is strikingly illustrated by the following comparison of figures taken from the official records.
The standard ratio of deaths to the total living in a community where the death rate is normal under proper sanitary conditions has been fixed by competent authority at about fifteen in one thousand of population.
The death rate in New York in the five years preceding eighteen sixty six averaged thirty eight in one thousand population, which is twenty three in excess of the normal standard of fifteen in the thousand.
In a city with a population of a million, the estimated population of New York in eighteen sixty five, a death rate of thirty eight in the thousand means twenty three thousand deaths annually from preventable diseases.
Mortality statistics computed on a scale of forty years, the period during which New York has been under an intelligent sanitary government still more impressively show the former waste of life through municipal neglect of the elementary principles of public hygiene.
The lesson which these figures teach should be engraven on the memory of every man, woman and child.
Showing 41–60 of 1,482 · page 3 of 75
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