NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1  The maple syrup smell became a media event in the twenty-four-hour news cycle; articles appeared in the local press, on television news, and numerous news blogs. The comments from news blog readers are especially helpful in glimpsing the varied reactions of individuals. Quotations are from comment replies to Jake Dobkin, “Maple Sugar Smell Mystery!” Gothamist, October 28, 2005. http://gothamist.com/2005/10/28/maple_sugar_smell_mystery.php.

2  “The Bridgeport Nuisance,” Chicago Tribune, June 22, 1863, 4; “The Bridgeport Nuisance,” Chicago Tribune, May 29, 1863, 4; “Abominable Water,” Chicago Tribune, March 12, 1862, 4.

3  Libby Hill, The Chicago River: A Natural and Unnatural History (Chicago: Lake Claremont Press, 2000), 61–138; Harold L. Platt, Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 135–57; Louis P. Cain, “Sanitation in Chicago: A Strategy for a Lakefront Metropolis,” in The Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago, ed. Janice C. Reiff, Ann Durkin Keating, and James R. Grossman (Chicago: Chicago Historical Society, 2005), www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/300017.html.

4  Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language, 9th ed., s.v. “air”; Select Committee on Metropolitan Sewage Manure, Report, no. 474 ([London?], 1846), 109.

5  “Nursery of Pestilence,” New York Times, June 8, 1875, 6; “Our Drains!” Sanitarian 4, no. 37 (April 1876): 180; Will Carleton, “That Swamp of Death: A City Ballad,” Harper’s Weekly, September 17, 1881, cover.

6  On the biology of olfaction, see Trygg Engen, The Perception of Odors (New York: Academic Press, 1982), chap. 2. On the social and cultural construction of perception, see Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination, trans. Miriam L. Kochan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); Trygg Engen, Odor Sensation and Memory (New York: Praeger, 1991); and Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synott, Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (London: Routledge, 1994).

7  There have been calls for environmental historians to give greater attention to sensory history: Peter Coates, “The Strange Stillness of the Past: Toward an Environmental History of Sound and Noise,” Environmental History 10 (October 2005): 636–55; Adam Rome, “From the Editor,” Environmental History 9 (April 2004): 203. Useful overviews of sensory history include Mark M. Smith, Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Martin Jay, Sophia Rosenfeld, Mark S. R. Jenner, Jessica Riskin, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, and Elizabeth D. Harvey, “AHR Forum: The Senses in History,” American Historical Review 116, no. 2 (April 2011): 307–400; Mark M. Smith, Gerald J. Fitzgerald, Gabriella M. Petrick, Connie Y. Chiang, Richard Cullen Rath, James W. Cook, and David Howes, “The Senses in American History: A Roundtable,” Journal of American History 95, no. 2 (September 2008): 378–451.

8  Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 6; William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 67; Janice Carlisle, Common Scents: Comparative Encounters in High-Victorian Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 30–31; Rachel Herz, The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell (New York: William Morrow, 2007), 56–60.

9  Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, rev. ed., ed. Eric Dunning, Johan Goudsblom, and Stephen Mennell, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000); Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966; repr., New York: Routledge, 2007); Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986); Miller, Anatomy of Disgust; Classen, Howes, and Synott, Aroma.

10  David S. Barnes, The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle against Filth and Germs (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); David S. Barnes, “Confronting Sensory Crisis in the Great Stinks of London and Paris,” in Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life, ed. William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 103–29; Stephen Halliday, The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Capital (Stroud, UK: Sutton, 1999); John D. Thompson, “The Great Stench, or the Fool’s Argument,” Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine 64 (1991): 529–41.

11  Mark S. R. Jenner argues that we need a “quasi-ecological, history of smell and the senses that examines simultaneously the person or people perceiving and the environment that they inhabited.” Mark S. R. Jenner, “Follow Your Nose? Smell, Smelling, and Their Histories,” American Historical Review 116, no. 2 (April 2011): 335–51.

12  Classic works that define modernity as deodorization and desensitization include Corbin, Foul and the Fragrant; and Robert Jütte, A History of the Senses from Antiquity to Cyberspace, trans. James Lynn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 207–11, 265–80.

13  Michael Polanyi, “Tacit Knowing,” in The Tacit Dimension (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966), 3–25.

14  “The City,” Chicago Tribune, August 25, 1862, 4.

15  On women as authorities over home and family health, see Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990); Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Emily K. Abel, Hearts of Wisdom: American Women Caring for Kin, 1850–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); and Kathleen M. Brown, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

16  Useful histories of professionalization include George M. Frederickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of Union (New York: Harper and Row, 1965); George Daniels, “The Process of Professionalization in American Science: The Emergent Period, 1820–1860,” Isis 58, no. 2 (Summer 1967): 150–66; Nathan Reingold, “Definitions and Speculations: The Professionalization of Science in America in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Pursuit of Knowledge in the Early American Republic, ed. Alexandra Oleson and Sanborn C. Brown (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 33–69; Thomas Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977); and Paul Lucier, “The Professional and the Scientist in Nineteenth-Century America,” Isis 100, no. 4 (December 2009), 699–732.

17  John Matson, “Mystery of NYC Maple Syrup Smell Solved!” Scientific American News Blog, February 5, 2009, www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=mystery-of-nyc-maple-syrup-smell-so-2009-02-05#comments; Steven Johnson, “What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal about New York,” Wired, November 1, 2010, www.wired.com/magazine/2010/11/ff_311_new_york/all/1.

18  “The Hunter’s Point Stenches: Work of the Special Committee of the State Board of Health—Prof Chandler on the Evil,” clipping in Box 52, Folder 12, Chandler Papers.

19  Charles H. Brigham, “The Air Cure: What Shall We Breathe?” Herald of Health 14, no. 1 (July 1869): 9.

20  Ibid. Population figures are from census data. Not only was there a collective growth in the urban population, but the urban population was growing faster than that of rural areas. In 1800, 6 percent of Americans lived in cities, compared with 10.8 percent in 1840 and 25.7 percent in 1870. This rapid shift continued, and the majority of the American populace was living in urban areas by the 1910s.

CHAPTER ONE: THE SMELLS OF SICK CITIES

1  John Hoskins Griscom, The Sanitary Condition of the Laboring People of New York (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1845), 7–10.

2  The Parliamentary Debates from the Year 1803 to the Present Time, vol. 11 (London: T. C. Hansard, 1812), 1124–25; Gouverneur Morris, Simeon DeWitt, and John Rutherford, Remarks of the Commissioners for Laying out Streets and Roads in the City of New York, under the Act of April 3, 1807 (New York: William Bridges, 1811), www.library.cornell.edu/Reps/DOCS/nyc1811.htm. During the parliamentary debates, Lord Windham attributed the phrase “lungs of London” to William Pitt in the previous century. Sociologist Richard Sennett also dates the creation of parks as urban lungs to eighteenth-century Paris and London. Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1996), 267–70, 325.

3  On medical geography in the nineteenth century, see Frank A. Barrett, Disease and Geography: The History of an Idea (Toronto: Geographic Monographs, 2000), 175–372; Nicolaas A. Rupke, ed., Medical Geography in Historical Perspective (London: Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, 2000); and Conevery Bolton Valencius, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (New York: Basic Books, 2002), chaps. 3 and 6.

4  Griscom, Sanitary Condition, 42; New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, First Report of a Committee on the Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Classes in the City of New York, with Remedial Suggestions (New York: John F. Trow, 1853), 4; Stephen Smith, The City That Was (New York: Frank Allaben, 1911), 17–18.

5  Quotation is from Griscom, Sanitary Condition, 4. For mortality figures and causes of death, see appendices 1 and 6 in John Duffy, A History of Public Health in New York City, 1625–1866 (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1968), 576, 583; and Gretchen A. Condran, “Changing Patterns of Epidemic Disease in New York City,” in Hives of Sickness: Public Health and Epidemics in New York City, ed. David Rosner (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 27–41.

6  Griscom, Sanitary Condition, 12.

7  John Arbuthnot, An Essay Concerning the Effects of Air on Human Bodies (London: J. and R. Tonson and S. Draper, 1751), 209; Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination, trans. Miriam L. Kochan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 71, 91; Sennett, Flesh and Stone, 227–34; Valencius, Health of the Country, chap. 2.

8  Jan Golinski, “Debating the Atmospheric Constitution: Yellow Fever and the American Climate,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 49, no. 2 (2016): 149–65.

9  Griscom, Sanitary Condition, 49 (emphasis in original); New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, First Report, 4. On Griscom’s religion and reform sentiments, see Charles E. Rosenberg, No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought, revised and expanded ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 109–16.

10  David Boswell Reid, Illustrations of the Theory and Practice of Ventilation, with Remarks on Warming, Exclusive Lighting, and the Communication of Sound (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1844), 3; David Boswell Reid, Ventilation in American Dwellings (New York: Wiley and Halsted, 1858), 3.

11  Benjamin J. Leslie, e-mail to author, June 24, 2016; George Wilson, Chemistry (Edinburgh, Scotland: William and Robert Chambers, 1850), 128–33; Elisha Harris, “An Introductory Outline of the Progress of Improvement in Ventilation,” in Reid, Ventilation in American Dwellings, v; Henry Letheby, Report on the Sanitary Condition of the City of London, qtd. in New York State Senate, Mr. Ely’s Report on the Sanitary Condition of the City of New York (Albany, NY: C. van Benhuysen, printer, 1859), 36.

12  John Hoskins Griscom, The Uses and Abuses of Air, Showing Its Influence in Sustaining Life, and Producing Disease, with Remarks on the Ventilation of Houses (New York: J. S. Redfield, 1848), 82. These figures come from the original assertion of John Zephaniah Howell, a survivor of the incident who published a narrative of the event. Scholars have questioned Howell’s figures but not the veracity of the event, which was widely known and frequently cited by ventilation proponents and advertisements in the 1800s, as well as in justifications of the British imperial project. See “The Black Hole of Calcutta,” History Today 56 (June 2006): 60–61; and Amalendu De, “A Note on the Black Hole Tragedy,” Quarterly Review of Historical Studies 10, no. 4 (1970): 187–92.

13  Griscom, Sanitary Condition, 8. On Griscom’s life and work, see John Duffy, The Sanitarians: A History of American Public Health (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 95–97; and Duncan Robert Jamieson, “Towards a Cleaner New York: John H. Griscom and New York’s Health, 1830–1870” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1972).

14  Griscom, Uses and Abuses, 5.

15  Carl Smith, City Water, City Life: Water and the Infrastructure of Ideas in Urbanizing Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), chap. 2; Martin V. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Environmental Services in Urban America from Colonial Times to the Present, abridged ed. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), chaps. 4–5, 7–8.

16  Griscom, Uses and Abuses, 5; John Hoskins Griscom, “Lectures for the People,” New York Times, January 21, 1852; John Hoskins Griscom, “The Roots of American Sanitary Reform 1843–47: Seven Letters from John H. Griscom to Lemuel Shattuck,” compiled by James H. Cassedy, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 30 (1975): 144. On private parks, see Catherine McNeur, Taming Manhattan: Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), chap. 2.

17  Andrew Jackson Downing, “The Favorite Poison of America,” in Rural Essays, ed. George William Curtis (New York: De Capo Press, 1974), 279, 281, 285.

18  Andrew Jackson Downing, “A Talk about Public Parks and Gardens,” in Curtis, Rural Essays, 145.

19  Ibid., 142–43; Andrew Jackson Downing, “The New-York Park,” in Curtis, Rural Essays, 147, 149, 150; Andrew Jackson Downing, “Public Cemeteries and Public Gardens,” in Curtis, Rural Essays, 154. See also Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 15–36; Thomas Bender, Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth-Century America (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1975), chap. 7; and David Schuyler, The New Urban Landscape: The Redefinition of City Form in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).

20  J. H. G., “Public Parks vs. Public Health,” New York Daily Times, June 30, 1853, 3.

21  Ibid.

22  Christopher Morris, “Impenetrable but Easy: The French Transformations of the Lower Mississippi Valley and the Founding of New Orleans,” in Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs: Centuries of Change, ed. Craig E. Colten (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), 22–42, esp. 40.

23  The Annual Report of the Board of Health of the City of New Orleans for 1849 (New Orleans: Printed at 107 Poydras St., 1850), 2; Griscom, Sanitary Condition,54. On vital statistics and the growth of statistical thinking, see James H. Cassedy, American Medicine and Statistical Thinking, 1800–1860 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); and Patricia Cline Cohen, A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America (London: Routledge, 1999), esp. chaps. 5–6.

24  Annual Report … for 1849, 2, 9.

25  Report of the Sanitary Commission of New Orleans on the Epidemic Yellow Fever of 1853 (New Orleans: Picayune Office, 1854), xi, 360 (emphasis in original). Cuban doctor Carlos Finlay suggested that mosquitoes spread yellow fever in 1881, a theory confirmed by the research of Walter Reed and US Army physicians in 1900. On the discovery that mosquitoes spread yellow fever, see Molly Caldwell Crosby, The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever; The Epidemic That Shaped Our History (New York: Berkeley Books, 2006); and E. Chaves-Carballo, “Carlos Finlay and Yellow Fever: Triumph over Adversity,” Military Medicine 170, no. 10 (October 2005): 881–85.

26  Report … Yellow Fever of 1853, xi, xvi (emphasis in original). Dell Upton also points out Barton’s emphasis on urban growth as the cause of sickness. Dell Upton, Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 62–63.

27  Report … Yellow Fever of 1853, 347.

28  Ibid., 350; Report of a General Plan for the Promotion of Public and Personal Health, Devised, Prepared and Recommended by the Commissioners Appointed under a Resolve of the Legislature of Massachusetts Relating to a Sanitary Survey of the State (Boston: Dutton and Wentworth, 1850), 166; Horace Bushnell, Work and Play; or, Literary Varieties (New York: Charles Scribner, 1864), 321. For connections between the midcentury sanitary movement and Progressive-era city planning, see Jon A. Peterson, The Birth of City Planning in the United States, 1840–1917 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), esp. 29–39.

29  Report … Yellow Fever of 1853, 360, 423–30.

30  Ibid., xvii, 454.

31  J. S. McFarlane, MD, “A Review of the Yellow Fever, its Causes, &c., with Some Remarks on Hygiene,” in The Epidemic Summer: List of Interments in All the Cemeteries of New Orleans (New Orleans: Published by the Proprietor of the True Delta, 1853), iv–xiii.

32  Edwin M. Snow, Statistics and Causes of Asiatic Cholera, as It Prevailed in Providence, in the Summer of 1854: Being a Letter Addressed to the Mayor of Providence (Providence, RI: Knowles, Anthony and Co., 1855), 5.

33  Ibid., 11.

34  Projit Bihari Mukharji argues that the “cholera cloud” was nearly universally recognizable in nineteenth-century Britain, though each incident had local meanings and variations. Snow’s conception of a mysterious atmospheric cause determined by local conditions fits this model. Projit Bihari Mukharji, “The ‘Cholera Cloud’ in the Nineteenth-Century ‘British World’: History of an Object-without-an-Essence,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 86, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 303–32; Snow, Statistics and Causes, 9.

35  Snow, Statistics and Causes, 12.

36  Ibid., 13–14 (emphasis in original).

37  E. M. Snow, letter to J. H. Griscom, qtd. in New York State Senate, Mr. Ely’s Report, 42.

38  New York State Senate, Mr. Ely’s Report, 1.

39  Griscom, Sanitary Condition, 3, 8–9.

40  New York State Senate, Mr. Ely’s Report, 30–31.

41  Ibid., 31.

42  Griscom, Uses and Abuses, 177.

43  Ibid., 55–56, 58.

44  New York State Senate, Mr. Ely’s Report, 34.

45  “Strange Cause of Illness,” Daily Evening Traveller, March 2, 1857, 3; “The Recent Epidemic at Willard’s Hotel,” Evening Post, March 14, 1857, 2; “The Washington Mystery,” Newark Daily Advertiser, March 17, 1857, 3; “National Hotel, Washington,” Baltimore American, March 7, 1857, 2; “The Sickness at the National Hotel,” Daily National Intelligencer, March 24, 1857, 3.

46  New York State Senate, Mr. Ely’s Report, 5, 8. For an organizational account of this reform effort, see Duffy, History of Public Health in New York City, 540–46.

47  Report of the Council of Hygiene and Public Health of the Citizens’ Association of New York upon the Sanitary Condition of the City (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1865), xiii, xviii.

48  Ibid., xxii, xxvii.

49  Ibid., 8, 34, xciii.

50  Ibid., xcix, ci–cii. On chemists in urban governance and public health, see Christopher Hamlin, “The City as a Chemical System? The Chemist as Urban Environmental Professional in France and Britain, 1780–1880,” Journal of Urban History 33 (2007): 702–28.

51  Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, First Report of a Committee on the Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Classes in the City of New-York, with Remedial Suggestions (New York: J. F. Trow, 1853), 8–9, 12; Report … of the Citizens’ Association of New York, 49–54 (emphasis in original).

52  Report … of the Citizens’ Association of New York, 56–61.

53  On the use of maps to collate and understand diverse information, see Susan Schulten, Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), esp. 86–98. Schulten notes that sanitary maps “implied the necessity of governance” by showing “disease as a threat to the city’s survival” (97).

54  Report … of the Citizens’ Association of New York, lv–lvi.

55  For useful overviews of the long campaign and political machinations behind the Metropolitan Health Bill, see Duffy, History of Public Health, chap. 24; and Charles S. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 186–91.

56  Griscom, Sanitary Condition, 8.

CHAPTER TWO: NAVIGATING BY NOSE

1  “Civic or Rural Life?” New York Daily Times, June 23, 1853, 2. We must understand discussions such as these complaints about bad smells, which were accompanied by or documented physical reactions to odors, as revealing real concerns about physical health, even as commentators simultaneously talked about the city’s metaphoric “civic health.” In this, I differ from the interpretation of Adam Mack, Sensing Chicago: Noisemakers, Strikebreakers, and Muckrakers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), esp. introduction and chap. 1. On nineteenth-century beliefs that urban growth was antithetical to American democracy, see Thomas Bender, Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth-Century America (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1975); Morton White and Lucia White, The Intellectual versus the City from Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and MIT Press, 1962), esp. chaps. 2–3; David Schuyler, The New Urban Landscape: The Redefinition of City Form in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), chaps. 1–2; Steven Conn, Americans against the City: Anti-urbanism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 11–17.

2  “Which All the While Ran Blood,” Commercial Advertiser, March 27, 1844, 1; “The City,” Chicago Tribune, August 25, 1862, 4.

3  “Lesser Gossip,” Home Journal, July 15, 1854, 2.

4  Common Sense, “Health,” Charleston Courier, April 27, 1840, 2.

5  Ibid. I deliberately use the term common sense because it is both accurate to the period and emphasizes that common sense encompassed scientific or medical knowledge. Other scholars have coined the phrases tacit knowledge, lay knowledge, civic epistemologies, or vernacular epistemology to refer to the same phenomena, but these terms contrast commonly shared knowledge with supposedly superior scientific or expert knowledge. See, for example, Michael Polanyi, “Tacit Knowing,” in The Tacit Dimension (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966), 3–25; Brian Wynne, “Misunderstood Misunderstandings: Social Identities and Public Uptake of Science,” in Misunderstanding Science? The Public Reconstruction of Science and Technology, ed. Alan Irwin and Brian Wynne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 19–46; and Sheila Jasanoff, Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 255.

6  On shared experience and knowledge of the environment in western expansion, see Conevery Bolton Valencius, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (New York: Basic Books, 2002), chap. 4; and Linda Nash, Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), chaps. 1–3. On Jacksonian democracy and the medical marketplace, see John Harley Warner, The Therapeutic Perspective: Medical Practice, Knowledge, and Identity in America, 1820–1885 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); and Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry, reprint ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1984), chaps. 1–2. The American Medical Association was established in 1847, largely to regulate medical education and licensing.

7  “Smelling,” Robert Merry’s Museum 3, no. 1 (January–June 1842): 129–31.

8  “No Quackery,” Friend: A Religious and Literary Journal, August 21, 1841, 369.

9  Ibid.

10  Ibid.

11  Ibid.

12  My analysis here is drawn from visual evidence in city maps and panoramas. In the 1830 “Plan of the City of Philadelphia Compiled from Actual Survey by F. Drayton,” in Philadelphia in 1830–1; or, A Brief Account of the Various Institutions and Public Objects in the Metropolis: Forming a Complete Guide for Strangers, and a Useful Compendium for the Inhabitants (Philadelphia: E. L. Carey and A. Hart, printed by James Kay, Jun. and Co., 1830), Penn’s initial plan and the city grid are clearly marked, but dots indicate “the built part of the city.” The blocks west of Thirteenth Street are sparsely dotted, showing that the western portion of the city was not yet inhabited and consisted of open spaces more often associated with the countryside than the city. A similar map of New York City in 1850 indicated grass and vacancies to show the difference between the built portions of the city and political boundaries. The quotation describing Boston in 1829 is from Bowen’s Pictures of Boston; or, The Citizen’s and Stranger’s Guide to the Metropolis of Massachusetts, and Its Environs (Boston: Abel Bowen, 1829), 239.

13  Views of Philadelphia and Its Vicinity, Embracing a Collection of Twenty Views, from the Paintings by J. C. Wild (Philadelphia: J. T. Bowen, 1848), plate 4 and accompanying verse by Andrew M’Makin, text accompanying plate 18; Henry McIntyre, Map of the City of Boston and Immediate Neighborhood (Boston: H. McIntyre, 1852); George G. Foster, New York in Slices, rev. ed. (New York: Garrett and Co., 1852), 88.

14  Foster, New York in Slices, 88. On the urban parks movement, see Bender, Toward an Urban Vision, chap. 7.

15  “Nuisances,” Saturday Evening Post, June 29, 1850, 2.

16  William J. Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 62; West Side of Charleston, “To the Honorable the Mayor and City Council,” Charleston Courier, June 30, 1840, 2.

17  On variations in nuisance law between American cities, see Stanley K. Schultz, Constructing Urban Culture: American Cities and City Planning, 1800–1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 42–47. Historians differ on the power and efficacy of nuisance law in the nineteenth century. William Novak argues that nuisance law was a powerful force of government regulation, but those who study the prosecution of nuisance cases find that the enforcement of nuisance law was uneven at best. Novak, People’s Welfare, 60–62, 217–33. See also Noga Morag-Levine, Chasing the Wind: Regulating Air Pollution in the Common Law State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), chaps. 4–6; Christine Meisner Rosen, “Noisome, Noxious, and Offensive Vapors, Fumes and Stenches in American Towns and Cities, 1840–1865,” Historical Geography 25 (1997): 49–82; Christine Meisner Rosen, “‘Knowing’ Industrial Pollution: Nuisance Law and the Power of Tradition in a Time of Rapid Economic Change, 1840–1864,” Environmental History 8, no. 4 (October 2003): 565–97; Andrew Hurley, “Creating Ecological Wastelands: Oil Pollution in New York City, 1870–1900,” Journal of Urban History 20, no. 3 (May 1994): 340–64; and Andrew Hurley, “Busby’s Stink Boat and the Regulation of Nuisance Trades, 1865–1918,” in Common Fields: An Environmental History of Saint Louis (Saint Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 1997), 145–62.

18  “Local Affairs,” Public Ledger, April 9, 1843, 2. Geographer J. Douglas Porteous uses the term smellscape to describe the “landscape of smell.” On smellscapes and olfactory geography, see J. Douglas Porteous, Landscapes of the Mind: Worlds of Sense and Metaphor (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990): 21–45; Jim Drobnick, ed., The Smell Culture Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2006): 85, 89; Jim Drobnick, “Toposmia: Art, Scent and Interrogations of Spatiality,” Angelaki 7, no. 1 (2002): 31–46; and Paul Rodaway, Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense and Place (London: Routledge, 1994), 61–81.

19  “The Nose in the City,” Circular, July 25 1854, 399 (emphasis in original).

20  Ibid.

21  “Nuisances”; John Hastings, “Albany Jail,” Albany Argus, June 19, 1841, 1; “Court of Oyer and Terminer,” New York Evening Post, April 3, 1846, 2.

22  “Proceedings of Council,” Register of Pennsylvania 5, no. 8 (February 20, 1830): 124; Philadelphia in 1830–1, 147. This petition is particularly interesting because it disproves upper-class observations that the lower classes lacked a sense of smell and thus were immune or insensitive to foul odors. On the laboring classes’ sense of smell, see Jonathan Reinarz, Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 145–75.

23  “Proceedings of Council.”

24  Foster, New York in Slices, 4.

25  This is in striking contrast to the literature on “the stinking working-class” or the trope of “the smell of money,” the two interpretations that dominate many of the considerations of odor and class in historical literature. The former documents, and often shares, the revulsion of middle and upper classes for laborers, even as reformers strove to help the same. The latter emphasizes the rhetoric that celebrated industrial stenches as signs of economic prosperity and job opportunities, ignoring the irony that if one had to explain why a smell was good, that person probably noticed and disliked the odor. On labor and odors, see Connie Y. Chiang, “Monterey-by-the-Smell: Odors and Social Conflict on the California Coast,” Pacific Historical Review 73, no. 2 (2004): 183–214; Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination, trans. Miriam L. Kochan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), chap. 9; and Daniel E. Bender, “Sensing Labor: The Stinking Working-Class after the Cultural Turn,” in Rethinking U.S. Labor History: Essays on the Working-Class Experience, 1756–2009, ed. Donna T. Haverty-Stacke and Daniel J. Walkowitz (New York: Continuum, 2010), 243–65.

26  On etiquette and controlling body odors, see Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 114; John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990), 121; and Kathleen M. Brown, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 243–46, 285–86.

27  “The Power of Caste,” Independent, February 17, 1853, 26.

28  On odors in fiction, see Hans J. Rindisbacher, The Smell of Books: A Cultural-Historical Study of Olfactory Perception in Literature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992); Janice Carlisle, Common Scents: Comparative Encounters in High-Victorian Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); and William A. Cohen, Embodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

29  “A Word for the Nose and Its Privileges,” Albion: A Journal of News, Politics and Literature, February 2, 1856, 53; Friends’ Intelligencer, July 8, 1854, 245; “Oil of Nosegay,” Scientific American, January 5, 1856, 136.

30  “Word for the Nose and Its Privileges”; Andrew M’Makin, “High Street Market,” in Views of Philadelphia and Its Vicinity, verse accompanying plate 14.

31  Andrew Jackson Downing, “Shade Trees in Cities,” Horticulturalist and Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste, August 1, 1852, 345–49.

32  Reasons for planting the ailanthus can be found in M. B. B., “Scentless Ailanthus Trees,” Ohio Farmer, August 22, 1857, 134; and Peter Coates, American Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species: Strangers on the Land (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 119. Quotations about the ailanthus odor are from “A Blossoming Nuisance,” New York Times, June 30, 1859; Ed. O. F., “Remarks,” Ohio Farmer, July 18, 1857, 113; Downing, “Shade Trees,” 345–49 (emphasis in original); “The Ailanthus,” Valley Farmer, July 1853, 249; and “A Visit to Town,” Home Journal, April 22, 1854, 2.

33  Downing, “Shade Trees,” 346. Chilton’s absolution of the ailanthus appears in “Editorial Inkdrops,” Flag of Our Union, August 25, 1855. All of Chilton’s activities were common ways to earn a living by doing science in the nineteenth century. Paul Lucier, Scientists and Swindlers: Consulting on Coal and Oil in America, 1820–1890 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), esp. introduction. In the literature on advertising, very little has been written about the role of scientific testimony in the antebellum period. After the Civil War, patent medicines dominate discussions of scientific testimony in advertising, and thus much that has been written is critical of “expert” opinion. See William H. Helfand, Quack, Quack, Quack: The Sellers of Nostrums in Prints, Posters, Ephemera and Books (New York: Grolier Club, 2002), esp. 35–39, 47; T. J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1995); John C. Burnham, How Superstition Won and Science Lost: Popularizing Science and Health in the United States (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), esp. 76–79; and James Harvey Young, The Toadstool Millionaires: A Social History of Patent Medicines in America before Federal Regulation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961).

34  “Gleanings from the French Journals,” American Journal of Pharmacy, no. 31 (May 1859): 229–30.

35  “The Poison Ailanthus,” New York Times, June 30, 1859, 1; “The Ailanthus,” Friends’ Intelligencer, July 16, 1859, 288; “The Poisonous Ailanthus,” Ohio Farmer, October 1, 1859, 315.

36  “Our Upas Trees,” New York Daily Times, July 2, 1855, 4. On the history of struggles against unwanted urban plants—though not the ailanthus—see Zachary J. S. Falck, Weeds: An Environmental History of Metropolitan America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010).

37  “Greek Fire,” Chicago Tribune, September 1, 1862, 3.

38  On the struggle for employment as a professional man of science in the nineteenth-century United States, see Lucier, Scientists and Swindlers, esp. introduction.

39  James F. Johnston, The Chemistry of Common Life, 10th ed. (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1869), 1:v. Johnston’s book went through numerous reprintings between 1853 and 1898 and was translated into German, Danish, Swedish, and Chinese.

40  James F. Johnston, The Chemistry of Common Life, 8th ed. (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1856), 2:179, 214–15. Johnston’s reverence for the nose and chemists’ regular use of their noses to identify odors challenges historian Lissa Roberts’s argument that scientific apparatus displaced the use of the natural senses in the eighteenth century. Lissa Roberts, “Death of the Sensuous Chemist: The ‘New’ Chemistry and the Transformation of Sensuous Technology,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 26, no. 4 (1995): 503–29.

41  Johnston, Chemistry of Common Life, 8th ed., 2:180.

42  Ibid., 220.

43  Ibid., 223–27.

44  Ibid., 249–69.

45  Ibid., 258–59 (emphasis in original).

46  Ibid., 256–57.

47  Ibid., 249.

48  Olfactorious [pseud.], “Pursuit of Fresh Air under Difficulties,” New York Times, July 12, 1858, 2 (emphasis in original).

49  “The Corporation Pastilles,” Commercial Advertiser, March 8, 1845, 28; Alice B. Neal, “Two Sides to the Picture,” Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, July 22, 1854, 42.

50  While rail lines made seashore retreats more accessible and widely popular during the Gilded Age, many of these communities had their start as urban escapes in the antebellum period. Cape May, New Jersey, was a well-known retreat for Philadelphians beginning in the eighteenth century. Atlantic City’s first hotel opened in 1853, and wealthy northerners began building homes in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1852, joining wealthy southerners who had been summering in the cooler temperatures since 1839. On the role of the city in constructing the Catskills as a summer retreat, see David Stradling, Making Mountains: New York City and the Catskills (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007), esp. chap. 3. On development of early suburbs served by rail lines and ferries, see Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), chap. 5; and John Stilgoe, Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb, 1820–1939 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), esp. part 3.

CHAPTER THREE: SMELLS LIKE HOME

1  Report of the Council of Hygiene and Public Health of the Citizens’ Association of New York upon the Sanitary Condition of the City (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1865), xxv, 243.

2  The gendered responsibility and labor of women as nursemaids, midwives, and family caretakers remained constant from the colonial period through the professionalization of medicine in the late nineteenth century. See Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Goodwives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750 (New York: Vintage Books, 1980); and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990); Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Emily K. Abel, Hearts of Wisdom: American Women Caring for Kin, 1850–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); and Kathleen M. Brown, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

3  Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language, 9th ed., s.v. “disinfect,” “infect,” and “sweeten.” On infection before germ theory, see David S. Barnes, “Cargo, ‘Infection,’ and the Logic of Quarantine in the Nineteenth Century,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 88, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 75–101, esp. 91–95; and Owsei Temkin, “An Historical Analysis of the Concept of Infection,” in The Double Face of Janus and Other Essays in the History of Medicine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 456–71, esp. 462: “Today we distinguish between disinfectant and deodorant. But as long as pollution of the air was a guiding concept, including any impurity noticeable to the senses or by its alleged results, such a distinction was almost impossible to make.”

4  Suellen Hoy, Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Juliann Sivulka, “From Domestic to Municipal Housekeeper: The Influence of the Sanitary Movement on Changing Women’s Roles in America,” Journal of American Culture 22, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 1–7.

5  “Disinfection,” Prairie Farmer 8, no. 9 (September 1848): 286; S. R., “The Sense of Smell,” American Agriculturalist 9, no. 9 (August 1850): 283.

6  Hoy, Chasing Dirt, chap. 1; Jack Larkin, The Reshaping of Everyday Life, 1790–1840 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 157–66; Catherine McNeur, Taming Manhattan: Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), chap. 3; Brown, Foul Bodies, chaps. 7–10.

7  “Disinfection”; S. R., “Sense of Smell.”

8  Martha Ogle Forman, Plantation Life at Rose Hill: The Diaries of Martha Ogle Forman, 1814–1845, ed. W. Emerson Wilson (Wilmington: Historical Society of Delaware, 1976), 123, qtd. in Elisabeth Donaghy Garrett, At Home: The American Family, 1750–1850 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), 171; Solon Robinson, How to Live: Saving and Wasting; or, Domestic Economy Illustrated (New York: Fowler and Wells, 1860), 115–16.

9  Frances Harriet Greene, The Housekeeper’s Book (Philadelphia: William Marshall and Co., 1837), 172.

10  Catharine E. Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy, for the Use of Young Ladies at Home, and at School, 1st ed. (Boston: Marsh, Capen, Lyon, and Webb, 1841), 337–39; Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language, 9th ed., s.v. “sweet.”

11  Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1976), 151.

12  On the importance of entryways in the homes of middle-class Americans, see Kenneth L. Ames, Death in the Dining Room and Other Tales of Victorian Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), chap. 1; Clifford Edward Clark Jr., The American Family Home, 1800–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 44–45.

13  Andrew Jackson Downing, Rural Essays, ed. George William Curtis (New York: Da Capo Press, 1974), 306, 312. For more on planting trees and improving urban culture, see Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 354–56. Early republic streetscapes can be found in Dell Upton, Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 29–31, 43, 47. Trees in these images are concentrated in gardens or parks. Farmhouses and rural dwellings also lacked shade trees in the early years of the nineteenth century; see Larkin, Reshaping of Everyday Life, 127–30.

14  James F. Johnston, The Chemistry of Common Life, 8th ed. (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1856), 2:214.

15  D. M. Ferry and Co. trade cards, Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera, Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library, Winterthur, DE; E. A. Maling, “Window Plants for Towns,” Ladies’ Friend 2, no. 7 (July 1865): 493; Henry C. Castellanos, New Orleans as It Was: Episodes of Louisiana Life, 2nd ed. (New Orleans: L. Graham Co., 1905), 153.

16  “Disinfection”; Catherine [sic] E. Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy, for the Use of Young Ladies at Home, and at School, rev. ed. (Boston: Thomas H. Webb, and Co., 1843), 279–80, 290–91, 324.

17  Robinson, How to Live, 148–49; “Disinfection.”

18  “Disinfection”; Beecher, Treatise (1843), 237.

19  Beecher, Treatise (1843), 120, 299.

20  Ibid., 120, 131, 196–98; Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman’s Home; or, Principles of Domestic Science, Being a Guide to the Formation and Maintenance of Economical, Healthful, Beautiful, and Christian Homes (New York: J. B. Ford and Co., 1869), 43.

21  Catharine E. Beecher, Letters to the People on Health and Happiness (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1855), 33, 61–63, 92–94, 103, 109, 144, 165–69; Beecher and Stowe, American Woman’s Home, chaps. 4 and 36.

22  Catherine [sic] E. Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy, for the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School, rev. ed. (Boston: Thomas H. Webb, and Co., 1842), 258. On early plumbing arrangements and class, see Maureen Ogle, All the Modern Conveniences: American Household Plumbing, 1840–1890 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), chap. 1; Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), chap. 5.

23  Beecher, Treatise (1841), 282–83. The olfactory benefit of the separate kitchen was noted in 1705 by Virginian Robert Beverley: “Dwelling-Houses, which by this means [detached kitchens] are kept more cool and Sweet.” Quoted in John E. Crowley, The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 84.

24  Beecher, Treatise (1843), 317–19.

25  Ibid., 322.

26  Ibid.

27  Ibid., 283.

28  Ibid., 196, 264, 311.

29  French historian Alain Corbin argues that changes in domestic architecture during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries created both the desired spatial segregation of activities and unintended shifts in odor toleration. Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination, trans. Miriam L. Kochan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), chap. 10.

30  On how changes in domestic technology increased rather than lightened workloads, see Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983).

31  Susan Augusta Fenimore Cooper, Diary of Susan Fenimore Cooper, January, 1850?, in Journal of a Naturalist in the United States, vol. 2 (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1855), 244; Henry D. Thoreau, Walden (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell and Co., 1910), 337–38; Downing, Rural Essays, 278–79.

32  Downing, Rural Essays, 278–80 (emphasis in original).

33  Sean Patrick Adams, Home Fires: How Americans Kept Warm in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), chap. 1; Priscilla J. Brewer, From Fireplace to Cookstove: Technology and Domestic Ideal in America (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), chap. 5.

34  Beecher, Letters to the People on Health and Happiness, 92 (emphasis in original).

35  Ibid., 94.

36  Robinson, How to Live, 34–35.

37  Ogle, All the Modern Conveniences, chaps. 1–2; Jamie Benidickson, The Culture of Flushing: A Social and Legal History of Sewage (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007), 82; Martin V. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Environmental Services in Urban America from Colonial Times to the Present, abridged ed. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), chap. 4; Carl Smith, City Water, City Life: Water and the Infrastructure of Ideas in Urbanizing Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), chap. 2; Strasser, Never Done, chap. 5.

38  Melosi, Sanitary City, chap. 5.

39  Beecher, Treatise (1841), 293–94.

40  May N. Stone, “Plumbing Paradox: American Attitudes toward Late Nineteenth-Century Domestic Sanitary Arrangements,” Winterthur Portfolio 14, no. 3 (Autumn 1979): 294.

41  Beecher and Stowe, American Woman’s Home, 403. On the recycling of urban excrement, see Joel Tarr, “From City to Farm: Urban Wastes and the American Farmer,” Agricultural History 49, no. 4 (October 1975): 598–612; and Natalka Freeland, “The Dustbins of History: Waste Management in Late-Victorian Utopias,” in Filth: Dirt Disgust and Modern Life, ed. William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 225–49.

42  Beecher and Stowe, American Woman’s Home, 406.

43  Ibid., 407, 412.

44  T. Webster and Mrs. Parkes, The American Family Encyclopedia of Useful Knowledge (New York: J. C. Derby, 1856), 140.

CHAPTER FOUR: THE STENCHES OF CIVIL WAR

1  William B. Westervelt, Lights and Shadows of Army Life: As Seen by a Private Soldier (Marlboro, NY: C. H. Cochrane, 1886), 23.

2  On sensory aspects of the Civil War, see Mark M. Smith, The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

3  According to the US Census Bureau, 19.77 percent of Americans in 1860 lived in “urban territory,” defined as places with populations larger than twenty-five hundred. Population statistics from US Department of Commerce, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Part 1 (1975), Series A 57-72, p. 12. On healthful environments and locations for settlement, see Conevery Bolton Valencius, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Linda Nash, Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); and Daniel Drake, A Systematic Treatise on the Principal Diseases of the Interior Valley of North America (Cincinnati, OH: Winthrop B. Smith and Co., 1850).

4  William A. Hammond, A Treatise on Hygiene with Special Reference to the Military Service (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott and Co., 1863), 452, 448. Recent studies of the conditions of war have made the urban connotations of Civil War environments clear: Kathryn Shively Meier, Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), chap. 2; Michael C. C. Adams, Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), chap. 2.

5  The death figures are from J. David Hacker, “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead,” Civil War History 57 (2011): 307–48; Shauna Devine, Learning from the Wounded: The Civil War and the Rise of American Medical Science (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 215. On western pioneers and health, see Valencius, Health of the Country.

6  Kathryn Shively Meier, “U.S. Sanitary Commission Physicians and the Transformation of American Health Care,” in So Conceived and So Dedicated: Intellectual Life in the Civil War Era North, ed. Lorien Foote and Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 19–40; Heather Cox Richardson, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007); Suellen Hoy, Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), chap. 3; Devine, Learning from the Wounded, chap. 6.

7  David Lane, A Soldier’s Diary: The Story of a Volunteer, 1862–1865 ([Jackson, MI?]: David Lane, 1905), 17; Alfred Lewis Castleman, Army of the Potomac: Behind the Scenes (Milwaukee, WI: Strickland, 1863), 44.

8  On the origins of the USSC in the Women’s Central Association of Relief, and the many ways in which women used the USSC to transform their traditional authority over health into political activity, see Judith Ann Giesberg, Civil War Sisterhood: The U.S. Sanitary Commission and Women’s Politics in Transition (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000). On medicine and physicians in the Civil War, see George Worthington Adams, Doctors in Blue: The Medical History of the Union Army in the Civil War (New York: Henry Schuman, 1952); William Quentin Maxwell, Lincoln’s Fifth Wheel: The Political History of the U.S. Sanitary Commission (New York: Longman, Green, and Co., 1956); Alfred Joy Bollet, Civil War Medicine: Challenges and Triumphs (Tucson, AZ: Galen Press, 2002); Margaret Humphreys, Marrow of Tragedy: The Health Crisis of the American Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); and Devine, Learning from the Wounded.

9  Historians are divided on the purpose of the USSC, in part because it was a massive organization composed of many strong-minded writers. Writing about northern intellectuals, George M. Frederickson challenged the commission’s narrative of philanthropy, arguing that the organization was overly concerned with instilling order and discipline in the lower classes. Medical historians such as Margaret Humphreys have taken a more positive view of the USSC’s efforts, pointing to the advances in medical knowledge, public health, and hospital design facilitated by the commission. George M. Frederickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), chap. 7; Humphreys, Marrow of Tragedy, chaps. 4, 10.

10  Robert Collyer, “Camp Inspection Return for 8th Penn Regiment,” Box 27, Folder 2, US Sanitary Commission Records, Statistical Bureau Archives (MssCol 18780), Manuscript and Archives Division, New York Public Library (hereafter USSC Statistical Bureau).

11  C. A. P., “A Live Colonel—Hooker’s Generalship—Scurvy in the Army,” New-York Daily Tribune, July 28, 1862, 1.

12  Castleman, Army of the Potomac, 7.

13  Document 40, in Documents of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, vol. 1 (New York, 1866), 13.

14  Hammond, Treatise on Hygiene, 391.

15  Camp Inspection Return no. 1446, Box 27, Folder 3, USSC Statistical Bureau.

16  John David Billings, Hardtack and Coffee; or, The Unwritten Story of Army Life (Boston: George M. Smith and Co., 1888), 47–48.

17  Castleman, Army of the Potomac, 60.

18  Hammond, Treatise on Hygiene, 459; Document 10, in Documents of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, vol. 1 (New York, 1866), 15; Frederick Law Olmsted to Hon. Charles F. Force, July 7, 1861, Box 226, Folder 1, US Sanitary Commission Records, Washington, DC, Archives (MssCol 22261), Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library (hereafter USSC DC Archives).

19  Kenneth W. Noe, ed., A Southern Boy in Blue: The Memoir of Marcus Woodcock, 9th Kentucky Infantry (U.S.A.) (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996), 156. On malingering as a strategy for health, see Meier, Nature’s Civil War, chap. 5.

20  “From Patterson’s Column,” New-York Daily Tribune, July 16, 1861, 7.

21  Luther Samuel Dickey, History of the 103d Regiment, Pennsylvania Veteran Volunteers, 1861–1865 (Chicago: L. S. Dickey, 1910), 177; “The War for the Union,” New-York Daily Tribune, August 17, 1861, 6.

22  Thomas Bender, “The ‘Rural’ Cemetery Movement: Urban Travail and the Appeal of Nature,” New England Quarterly 47, no. 2 (June 1974): 196–211; Peter Thorsheim, “The Corpse in the Garden: Burial, Health and the Environment in Nineteenth-Century London,” Environmental History 16 (January 2011): 38–68, esp. 40–47.

23  William Bircher, A Drummer-Boy’s Diary: Comprising Four Years of Service with the Second Regiment Minnesota Veteran Volunteers, 1861 to 1865 (Saint Paul, MN: Saint Paul Book and Stationery Co., 1889), 33; Robert Goldwaithe Carter, Four Brothers in Blue: or Sunshine and Shadows in the War of the Rebellion (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 131; Westervelt, Lights and Shadows of Army Life, 24.

24  John G. Barrett, ed., Yankee Rebel: The Civil War Journal of Edmund DeWitt Patterson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966), 8; Peter Messent and Steve Courtney, eds., The Civil War Letters of Joseph Hopkins Twichell: A Chaplain’s Story (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006),135–36.

25  Dr. A. Patze to US Sanitary Commission, April 16, 1862, Box 17, Folder 20, Item no. 754, USSC DC Archives.

26  Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), chaps. 1 and 3; Jack Larkin, The Reshaping of Everyday Life, 1790–1840 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 98–104.

27  Faust, This Republic of Suffering, 63–74 for burial problems, 217–34 for federal and military cemeteries.

28  On the use of African Americans for burial tasks in New Orleans and beliefs about racial immunity to yellow fever, see Ari Kelman, A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 105–9. The African American burial party is documented by John Reekie’s oft-reproduced photograph, A Burial Party, taken in Cold Harbor, Virginia, in 1865.

29  Faust, This Republic of Suffering, chap. 3; “How to Obtain the Bodies of Deceased Soldiers,” New-York Daily Tribune, October 3, 1865, 1.

30  As Faust documents in chapter 7 of This Republic of Suffering, the idea that the military and government are responsible for the care of war casualties was a product of the Civil War.

31  Walt Whitman qtd. in Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), 7:168–69, www.whitmanarchive.org/criticism/disciples/traubel/WWWiC/7/med.00007.90.html.

32  On hospitals before the Civil War, see Charles E. Rosenberg, The Care of Strangers: The Rise of America’s Hospital System (New York: Basic Books, 1987), chaps. 1–4.

33  Florence Nightingale, Notes on Nursing: What It Is, and What It Is Not (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 60), 23; Florence Nightingale, Notes on Hospitals: Being Two Papers Read before the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, at Liverpool, in October 1858 (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1859), 13.

34  David Boswell Reid to Henry G. Clark, Box 226, Folder 1, Item nos. 27 and 28, USSC DC Archives; notes by David Boswell Reid, Box 227, Folders 11, 12, and 13, USSC DC Archives; Lewis W. Leeds and Calbert Vaux to Frederick Law Olmsted, August 3, 1861, Box 2, Folder 2, Item no. 226, USSC DC Archives; Lewis W. Leeds to Frederick Law Olmsted, November 16, 1862, Box 226, Folder 1, Item no. 9, USSC DC Archives; Lewis W. Leeds to Frederick Law Olmsted, September 19, 1862, Box 25, Folder 19, Item no. 2234, USSC DC Archives.

35  Elisha Harris, “Sanitary Hints: Special Disinfectants and Their Applications,” in The Sanitary Commission Bulletin (New York, 1866), 1:59–60 (emphasis in original); Dr. Robert Ware to USSC, March 9, 1862, Box 15, Folder 17, Item no. 545, USSC DC Archives; Noe, Southern Boy in Blue, 37–38; E. Bliss to USSC, January 1, 1862, Box 14, Folder 7, Item no. 42, USSC DC Archives.

36  Louisa May Alcott, Hospital Sketches: An Army Nurse’s True Account of Her Experiences during the Civil War (1863; repr., Bedford, MA: Applewood Books, 1991), 27; Mary A. Livermore, My Story of the War (Hartford, CT: A. D. Worthington and Co., 1890), 188; Harris, “Sanitary Hints,” 59–60.

37  Harris, “Sanitary Hints,” 60. For a medical description of disinfectants and how they were understood at the time, see also Humphreys, Marrow of Tragedy, 81–86. Historians who try to explain wartime deaths in modern scientific terms overlook the use and definition of the term disinfectants before germ theory, instead focusing on ventilation separately from the treatment of wounds with what modern authors call antiseptics but Harris understood as disinfectants. See, for example, Adams, Doctors in Blue, 126–29, 194–221; Bollet, Civil War Medicine, 51–54, 212–13, 234; “Antiseptics and Disinfectants,” in Glenna R. Schroeder-Lein, The Encyclopedia of Civil War Medicine (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2008), 26–27. Joseph Lister is traditionally credited for understanding antiseptics beginning around 1867, but his use and definition of antiseptics changed over the course of his career. See Christopher Lawrence and Richard Dixey, “Practicing on Principle: Joseph Lister and the Germ Theories of Disease,” in Medical Theory, Surgical Practice: Studies in the History of Surgery, ed. Christopher Lawrence (London: Routledge, 1992), 153–215.

38  John L. Ransom, Andersonville Diary, Escape, and List of the Dead, with Name, Co., Regiment, Date of Death and No. of Grave in Cemetery (Auburn, NY, 1881), 40, 81.

39  US Sanitary Commission, Narrative of Privations and Sufferings of United States Officers and Soldiers while Prisoners of War in the Hands of Rebel Authorities (Philadelphia: King and Baird, 1864), 94, 115–17; Joseph Janvier Woodward, Outline of the Chief Camp Disease of the United States Armies as Observed during the Present War (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott and Co., 1863), 42–57.

40  Ransom, Andersonville Diary, 174.

41  US House of Representatives, Trial of Henry Wirz, April 16, 1866, in Executive Documents Printed by Order of the House of Representatives during the Second Session of the Fortieth Congress, 1867–’68 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1868), 8:70, 101, 108, 118. Union prisons were also unsanitary, unhealthy, and notorious for stenches: James M. Gillispie, Andersonvilles of the North: The Myths and Realities of Northern Treatment of Civil War Confederate Prisoners (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2008), 196–201; Michael P. Gray, The Business of Captivity: Elmira and Its Civil War Prison (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001), 26–27.

42  Ransom, Andersonville Diary, 50.

43  Ann Fabian, The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), chap. 4; Faust, This Republic of Suffering, 57.

44  Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 2nd American ed. (Philadelphia: Matthew Carey, 1794), 200–201. As historian Mark M. Smith notes, Jefferson overlooked obvious differences in labor that might better account for sweat and odors than biology. Mark M. Smith, How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation and the Senses (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), chap. 1.

45  “Hygienic Management of Negroes,” Georgia Weekly Telegraph, February 21, 1861, 3. Health reformers failed to count African American mortality rates during and after the Civil War, thus missing one of the deadliest smallpox epidemics in American history. See Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

46  “Is It a Prejudice?” New-York Daily Tribune, March 13, 1863, 4.

47  Ibid.

48  Ibid.; “Is It Prejudice?” New-York Daily Tribune, August 7, 1863, 4; “The Slave Trade,” New-York Daily Tribune, June 6, 1862, 2.

49  House of Representatives, Trial of Henry Wirz, 3–4.

50  Walt Whitman, Specimen Days and Collect (Philadelphia: Rees Welsh and Co., 1882), 310; Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (New York: Bantam Dell, 2004), 274–81.

51  On the political story behind the creation of New York City’s permanent board of health and the departure from earlier, ad hoc practices, see Charles S. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), chaps. 10–11.

CHAPTER FIVE: SMELLING COMMITTEES AND AUTHORITY OVER CITY AIR

1  Benjamin K. Phelps, District Attorney, “The People vs. Charles F. Chandler, Edward G. Janeway, S. Oakley Vanderpoel, William F. Smith—Misdemeanor,” in Box 16, Charles F. Chandler Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York, New York (hereafter Chandler Papers).

2  Charles Frederick Chandler, President of Board of Health, to Francis H. Amidon, Foreman of Grand Jury, Court of General Sessions, printed in “The Health Board Asks Full Inquiry,” New York Tribune, May 7, 1878, 8; “The Hunter’s Point Stenches: Work of the Special Committee of the State Board of Health—Prof Chandler on the Evil,” clipping in Box 52, Folder 12, Chandler Papers.

3  “The Sanitary Condition of the City,” Chicago Tribune, December 30, 1862, 4; “The Up-Town Fragrance,” New York Tribune, April 30, 1878, 4; Hackett qtd. in “The Recorder on Nuisances,” New York Tribune, May 7, 1878, 2.

4  Christopher Hamlin, “The City as a Chemical System? The Chemist as Urban Environmental Professional in France and Britain, 1780–1880,” Journal of Urban History 33 (2007): 702–28.

5  Bessie Louise Pierce, A History of Chicago, vol. 2, From Town to City, 1848–1871 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940); William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1991), chap. 2; Dominic Pacyga, Chicago: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 57–59; Harold L. Platt, Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), chap. 3.

6  Robin L. Einhorn, Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833–1872 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, esp. chap. 2; Platt, Shock Cities, chaps. 3, 4, and 6.

7  On the role of waterways as economic engines and conflicts over riparian rights, see Theodore Steinberg, Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and John T. Cumbler, Reasonable Use: The People, the Environment, and the State, New England, 1790–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

8  The quotations are from Smith Ely to W. H. Wickham, March 24, 1876, Box 51, Folder 2, Series II.3, Chandler Papers. See also Ted Steinberg, Gotham Unbound: The Ecological History of Greater New York (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), part 2; David Stradling, The Nature of New York: An Environmental History of New York State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), esp. 106–37; David Scobey, Empire City: The Making and Meaning of New York City Landscape (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), esp. 55–88; Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), esp. 649–73, 917–50; Andrew Hurley, “Creating Ecological Wastelands: Oil Pollution in New York City, 1870–1900,” Journal of Urban History 20, no. 3 (May 1994): 344; and Vincent F. Seyfried, 300 Years of Long Island City, 1630–1930 ([New York?]: Edgian Press, 1984), 83–99.

9  Professor Elwyn Waller as paraphrased in “East and West Side Nuisances,” New York Times, May 18, 1878, 2. Waller, an instructor at the Columbia School of Mines (now the Engineering Department at Columbia University) and chemist to New York City’s Board of Health, had written on odor, disinfectants, and disease in the American Chemist, which Chandler edited. See Elwyn Waller, “Disinfectants and Disinfection,” American Chemist 6, no. 1 (July 1875): 2–11.

10  Pedro [pseud.], “Those Smells Again,” New York Times, June 11, 1877, 4.

11  Platt, Shock Cities, 80; “The Water Question,” Chicago Tribune, February 21, 1862, 2.

12  “The Water Question Again,” Chicago Tribune, March 5, 1862, 2 (emphasis in original); Henry Allen Hazen, The Climate of Chicago (Washington, DC: Weather Bureau, 1893), 38, 57.

13  Chicago City Council Proceedings Files (hereafter CP), 1853/54:0548, 1853/54:0551, Illinois Regional Archive Depository, Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago (hereafter IL Depository); “The Water Question,” Chicago Tribune, July 26, 1862, 4.

14  David S. Barnes, “Confronting Sensory Crisis in the Great Stinks of London and Paris,” in Filth: Dirt, Disgust and Modern Life, ed. William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 103–29; David S. Barnes, The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle against Filth and Germs (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Stephen Halliday, The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Capital (Stroud, UK: Sutton, 1999); Thomas F. Glick, “Science, Technology and the Urban Environment: The Great Stink of 1858,” in Historical Ecology: Essays on Environment and Social Change, ed. Lester J. Bilsky (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1980).

15  S. N. Fisk, MD, “The Industries upon Newtown Creek and Their Alleged Offensiveness,” in Box 50, Folder 7, Series II.3, Chandler Papers.

16  Hurley, “Creating Ecological Wastelands,” 347.

17  Pedro [pseud.], “Those Smells Again”; X., “Where Does It Come From?” New York Times, May 26, 1875, 6.

18  “Water Question,” February 21, 1862.

19  “Water Question Again,” March 5, 1862; “Abominable Water,” Chicago Tribune, March 12, 1862, 4.

20  Platt, Shock Cities, 146–48; Thomas Neville Bonner, Medicine in Chicago, 1850–1950: A Chapter in the Social and Scientific Development of a City, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 6–8, 19–32.

21  CP, 1862/63:63, IL Depository.

22  Ibid. See also Libby Hill, The Chicago River: A Natural and Unnatural History (Chicago: Lake Claremont Press, 2000), 105–9.

23  CP, 1865/66:62S, IL Depository; Hill, Chicago River, 99–101, 107.

24  CP, 1862/63:75, IL Depository; “City Notes,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 9, 1876. Chemists in Europe had carved out a niche for themselves by applying their science to mineral and potable water analysis. In this role, chemists acted as arbiters of quality, an important and profitable position in the marketplace—even when the chemical analysis did not provide the answers sought about the healthfulness of water. Christopher Hamlin, A Science of Impurity: Water Analysis in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). On similar efforts of chemists in North America, see Paul Lucier, Scientists and Swindlers: Consulting on Coal and Oil in America, 1820–1890 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

25  CP, 1862/63:75, IL Depository; “Spare Us,” Chicago Tribune, July 2, 1862; “Water Question,” July 26, 1862. On the effects of the Chicago River on Lake Michigan and efforts to obtain drinking water from farther out in the lake, see Platt, Shock Cities, chap. 4.

26  “The City,” Chicago Tribune, August 26, 1862; “The Chicago River,” Chicago Times, August 25, 1862.

27  “The City.”

28  Ibid.; CP, 1862/63:166A, IL Depository; David Blanke, “Leather and Tanning,” in The Encyclopedia of Chicago, ed. James R. Grossman, Ann Durkin Keating, and Janice L. Reiff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 465; Isaac D. Guyer, History of Chicago: Its Commercial and Manufacturing Interests and Industry (Chicago: Church, Goodman and Cushing, 1862), 81–83, 164; Peter C. Welsh, “A Craft That Resisted Change: American Tanning Practices Prior to 1850,” Technology and Culture 4 (1963): 297–317.

29  “The City.”

30  Ibid.

31  CP, 1862/63:166A and 237A, IL Depository; “Common Council,” Chicago Times, September 9, 1862.

32  CP, 1862/63:144A, IL Depository.

33  Ibid.

34  CP, 1862/63:245A, IL Depository.

35  “The Sanitary Condition of the City,” Chicago Tribune, December 30, 1862, 4.

36  “The Bridgeport Nuisance,” Chicago Tribune, May 29, 1863; “The Bridgeport Nuisance,” Chicago Tribune, May 30, 1863; “The Bridgeport Nuisance,” Chicago Tribune, June 22, 1863.

37  On scientific education, see Mary Jo Nye, Before Big Science: The Pursuit of Modern Chemistry and Physics, 1800–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 3. The details of Chandler’s life and career are from Herman Skolnik and Kenneth M. Reese, eds., A Century of Chemistry: The Role of Chemists and the American Chemical Society (Washington, DC: American Chemical Society, 1976), 60–61; Marston Taylor Bogert, Biographical Memoir of Charles Frederick Chandler, 1836–1925 (Washington, DC: National Academy of the Sciences, 1931); M. C. Whitaker, “Charles Frederick Chandler—Dean of American Chemists,” Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry (October 1922): 977; and Chemical Heritage Foundation, “Charles F. Chandler,” www.chemheritage.org/discover/chemistry-in-history/themes/public-and-environmental-health/public-health-and-safety/chandler.aspx.

38  Manual of the Metropolitan Board of Health and the Metropolitan Board of Excise (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1869), 83; letter reprinted in Ohio Medical and Surgical Journal (August 1878), clipping in “Correspondence—1868–83,” Box 51, Folder 1, Chandler Papers.

39  On the organizing and professionalizing impulse after the Civil War, see Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1870–1920 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishers, 1974); Thomas Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977); Alexandra Oleson and John Voss, eds., The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1860–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979); George M. Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1965). For the importance of university departments to the development of chemistry and physics as academic disciplines, see Nye, Before Big Science, 6–20.

40  Annual Report of the Metropolitan Board of Health, 1866 (New York: C. S. Westcott and Co.’s Union Printing-House, 1867), 17. Visual depictions of Chandler—both photographs and cartoons—prominently featured his mustache. See, for example, Daily Graphic 1, no. 84 (June 10, 1873): 4; Daily Graphic 1, no. 85 (June 10, 1873): 1; and Harper’s Weekly, February 8, 1890, 100.

41  John Duffy, A History of Public Health in New York City, 1866–1966 (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1974), 50–52.

42  “Prof. Chandler’s Defense,” New York Times, June 4, 1878, 5. Musgrave published his sanitary survey and allegations as a pamphlet: Thomas B. Musgrave, Report of the Citizens’ Committee upon the Nuisances of New York City: The Air We Breathe (New York: S. Hamilton’s Son, 1878).

43  “Prof. Chandler’s Defense.”

44  Charles F. Chandler, address before a meeting of the New York County Medical Society, June 3, 1878, Box 52, Folder 1, Series II.3, Chandler Papers.

45  “The Hunter’s Point Stenches: Work of the Special Committee of the State Board of Health—Prof Chandler on the Evil,” clipping in Box 52, Folder 12, Chandler Papers.

46  Ibid.

47  S. A. Goldschmidt to Walter F. Day, MD, Sanitary Superintendent, July 1881, Box 1302, Folder 60, “Office of the Mayor, William Grace Administration, Subject Files, 1881–1882,” Municipal Archives, New York.

48  S. A. Goldschmidt to Walter F. Day, MD, Sanitary Superintendent, September 17, 1881, in Box 1302, Folder 60, “Office of the Mayor, William Grace Administration, Subject Files, 1881–1882,” Municipal Archives, New York.

49  First Annual Report of the State Board of Health (Albany, NY: Weed, Parsons and Co., 1881), 4, 90; Second Annual Report of the State Board of Health (Albany, NY: Weed, Parsons, and Co., 1882), 51.

50  Second Annual Report, 44; “Foul Odors in the City: Loud Complaints against Those from Hunter’s Point,” New York Times, February 1881, 8.

51  “Foul Odors in the City”; Second Annual Report, 339–42. The testimony was recorded by stenographers but not published in the board’s annual report and subsequently lost or destroyed.

52  Second Annual Report, 338; “Where Stenches Abound: A Still-Hunt by the State Board of Health,” New York Times, May 27, 1881, 10.

53  Second Annual Report, 51–52.

54  Ibid., 343–44.

55  Second Annual Report, 353.

CHAPTER SIX: LEARNING TO SMELL AGAIN

1  Quotation is from “Disinfectants,” Sanitarian 1, no. 6 (September 1873): 267.

2  David S. Barnes, The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle against Filth and Germs (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Michael Worboys, Spreading Germs: Disease Theories and Medical Practice in Britain, 1865–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

3  Mrs. H. M. Plunkett, Women, Plumbers, and Doctors; or, Household Sanitation (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1885), 94. Women not only received medical or scientific knowledge in their homes but also contributed to its production through their practices. This line of thought builds on and is indebted to the work of Nancy Tomes and Suellen Hoy. Tomes, Gospel of Germs; Suellen Hoy, Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

4  James F. Johnston, Chemistry of Common Life, 8th ed. (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1856), 2: chap. 28; Edward L. Youmans, The Hand-Book of Household Science: A Popular Account of Heat, Light, Air, Ailment, and Cleansing, in Their Scientific Principles and Domestic Applications (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1858), 436.

5  Youmans, Hand-Book of Household Science, 436–38.

6  Ibid.

7  Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman’s Home; or, Principles of Domestic Science, Being a Guide to the Formation and Maintenance of Economical, Healthful, Beautiful, and Christian Homes (New York: J. B. Ford and Co., 1869), 377–78.

8  “Do Bad Smells Cause Disease?” Chicago Medical Journal 3, no. 4 (April 1860): 233–36.

9  “The Cause of the Impurity of Our City Atmosphere,” in Annual Report of the American Institute of the City of New York for the Years 1864, ’65 (Albany, NY: C. Wendell, 1865), 441; “Topics of the Month,” Herald of Health 5, no. 2 (February 1865): 52.

10  Sanitary Committee of the Board of Health of Philadelphia, Sanitary and Preventive Measures; or, What May Be Done by the Public in Anticipation of the Cholera (Philadelphia: E. C. Markley and Sons, 1866), 6–7.

11  Elizabeth Fries Ellet, The New Cyclopaedia of Domestic Economy and Practical Housekeeper (Norwich, CT: Henry Bill, 1872), 19, 90.

12  Mrs. Henry Ward Beecher, “Little Things—But Useful,” Christian Union, September 22, 1880, 236.

13  Catharine E. Beecher, Miss Beecher’s Housekeeper and Healthkeeper (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1873), 145.

14  Roger S. Tracy, Handbook of Sanitary Information for Householders (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1884), 13; John Shaw Billings, Ventilation and Heating (New York: Engineering Record, 1893), 99.

15  Tracy, Handbook of Sanitary Information, 64–65.

16  Moreau Morris, “Defective Drainage—House Drainage,” Sanitarian 1, no. 7 (October 1873): 303; “Our Drains,” Sanitarian 4, no. 37 (April 1876): 180.

17  “The Death Traps We Live In,” Days’ Doings, November 27, 1875, 8; Joshua Brown, “The Days’ Doings: The Gilded Age in the Profane Pictorial Press,” www.joshbrownnyc.com/daysdoings/index.htm.

18  Charles F. Wingate, “The Unsanitary Homes of the Rich,” North American Review 137, no. 121 (August 1883): 174–75, 184.

19  Plunkett, Women, Plumbers, and Doctors, 16, 123.

20  Ibid., 27, 41.

21  William Paul Gerhard, House Drainage and Sanitary Plumbing, 2nd ed. (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1884), 21, 65.

22  Ibid., 17. Medical practitioners have had difficulty understanding sewer-gas fears because they arose in the same period as germ theory: Perry G. An, “Constructing and Dismantling Frameworks of Disease Etiology: The Rise and Fall of Sewer Gas in America, 1870–1910,” Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine 77 (2004): 75–100.

23  On the coexistence of miasma and germ theory, see also Tomes, Gospel of Germs, esp. part 1; Barnes, Great Stink of Paris; and Worboys, Spreading Germs.

24  On changing responses to similar odors, see David S. Barnes, “Confronting Sensory Crisis in the Great Stinks of London and Paris,” in Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life, ed. William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 103–29.

25  B. C. Morgan, MD [Celia M. Haynes], Happy Home Health Guide (Chicago: Emmert Proprietary Co., 1887), 150; Charles H. Brigham, “Take Care of Your Noses,” Herald of Health 15, no. 3 (March 1870): 114, 116. It is also possible that the inhabitants of foul-smelling tenements were cognizant of and worried about the odors, as were the laborers living in Rittenhouse Square (discussed in chapter 2), but were unable to complain because of their marginalized status as poor immigrants or foreign-language speakers or as illiterates. The absence of written sources from those living within the tenements should not make us accept the evaluations of middle-class sanitarians at face value.

26  Morgan [Haynes], Happy Home Health Guide, i, 145, 150.

27  Catharine E. Beecher, Treatise on Domestic Economy, for the Use of Young Ladies at Home, and at School, rev. ed. (Boston: Thomas H. Webb, and Co., 1843), 322; Harriet Beecher Stowe, House and Home Papers (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1865), 243; Christine Terhune Herrick, Housekeeping Made Easy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1888), 165–66.

28  Herrick, Housekeeping Made Easy, 224.

29  Henry Fraser Campbell, “The Yellow Fever Quarantine of the Future, Based upon the Portability of Atmospheric Germs, and the Non-contagiousness of the Disease,” in Public Health Papers and Reports (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1880), 5:143 (emphasis in original).

30  Peter Thorsheim, Inventing Pollution: Coal, Smoke and Culture in Britain since 1800 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 22–25; S. Wilmot, “Ozone and the Environment: Victorian Perspectives,” in The Chemistry of the Atmosphere: Oxidants and Oxidation in the Earth’s Atmosphere, ed. A. R. Bandy (Cambridge: Royal Society of Chemistry, 1995), 204–17; Mordecai B. Rubin, “The History of Ozone: The Schönbein Period, 1839–1868,” Bulletin for the History of Chemistry 26, no. 1 (2001): 40–56; Rubin, “The History of Ozone: II. 1869–1899,” Bulletin for the History of Chemistry 27, no. 2 (2002): 81–106; A. R. Leeds, “Ozone and the Atmosphere,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1, no. 1 (December 1879): 193–219.

31  J. C., “Ozone,” Once a Week 12, no. 290 (January 14, 1865): 94; “The Sanitary Value of Forests,” in Public Health Papers and Reports (Boston: Houghton, Osgood and Co., 1879), 4:34n2; Thorsheim, Inventing Pollution, 200–201.

32  Benjamin Ward Richardson, Hygeia: A City of Health (London: Macmillan, 1876), 41–42.

33  J. D. Plunket, MD, “Disinfection of Sewers by Ozone,” in Public Health Papers and Reports (Boston: Houghton, Osgood and Co., 1879), 4:298; I. N. Reed, ed., Encyclopedia of Health and Home: A Domestic Guide to Health, Wealth and Happiness; Thorough and Exhaustive and Adapted to the Easy Apprehension of All Classes (New York: I. N. Reed and Co., 1880), 260; “The Ozone Company New York–Chicago,” Ozone Company, Historical Library and Wood Institute, College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Philadelphia.

34  “Sanitary Value of Plants,” Ladies’ Floral Cabinet 13, no. 10 (October 1884): 327; “Aroma and Ozone,” Christian Union, September 3, 1870, 139; “Health Notes,” Ladies’ World 16, no. 2 (December 1895): 13.

35  Beverly Seaton, The Language of Flowers: A History (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995), 13–14 (for flower missions providing “inspiration”); Robin L. Cadwallader, “‘The Flower Charity. Heaven bless it!’: A Study of Charity in Literature and Culture,” Legacy 2 (2009): 377–87.

36  “Christmas Decorations,” New York Times, December 21, 1878; “The Helping Hand,” Harper’s Weekly, August 17, 1878, 647.

37  “A Beautiful Charity,” New York Times, May 6, 1879; “New-York Flower Mission,” New York Times, July 4, 1893; Eugenia Harper, “The Work of the New York Flower Mission,” Chautauquan 12 (October 1890): 87.

38  Annie Marie, “A Pot of Perfume,” Ladies’ Floral Cabinet 13, no. 6 (June 1884): 191; “Health Notes,” Ladies’ World 17, no. 8 (August 1896): 11.

CHAPTER SEVEN: VISUALIZING VAPORS AND SEEING SMELLS

1  On the origins of the concept of air pollution in the antismoke crusades, see Robert Dale Grinder, “The Anti-Smoke Crusades: Early Attempts to Reform the Urban Environment, 1893–1918” (PhD diss., University of Missouri–Columbia, 1973); Robert Dale Grinder, “The Battle for Clean Air: The Smoke Problem in Post–Civil War America,” in Pollution and Reform in American Cities, 1870–1930, ed. Martin V. Melosi (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980); Adam Rome, “Coming to Terms with Pollution: The Language of Environmental Reform, 1865–1915,” Journal of Environmental History 1, no. 3 (July 1996): 6–28; David Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives: Environmentalists, Engineers, and Air Quality in America, 1881–1951 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Joel Tarr, ed., Devastation and Renewal: An Environmental History of Pittsburgh and Its Region (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003); E. Melanie DuPuis, ed., Smoke and Mirrors: The Politics and Culture of Air Pollution (New York: New York University Press, 2004); Peter Thorsheim, Inventing Pollution: Coal, Smoke and Culture in Britain since 1800 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 200–201; Frank Uekoetter, The Age of Smoke: Environmental Policy in Germany and the United States, 1880–1970, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009). In contrast, Noga Morag-Levine’s legal history of air-control measures emphasizes the continuity of concern from stench nuisance through the antismoke crusades and twentieth-century emissions controls. Noga Morag-Levine, Chasing the Wind: Regulating Air Pollution in the Common Law State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

2  Board of Health of the City of Boston, Second Annual Report, City Doc. 63 (Boston: City of Boston, 1874), 42.

3  “The Miller’s River Nuisance,” Cambridge Chronicle, October 4, 1873, 2.

4  On ideas of objectivity, reality, photography, and the sense of sight, see Lorraine Daston and Peter Gallison, Objectivity (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2007); Chris Otter, The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), esp. chap. 1; Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History Matthew Brady to Walker Evans, repr. ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989).

5  “Miller’s River,” Boston Advertiser, August 2, 1873, 2; “Health Matters,” Cambridge Chronicle, August 2, 1873, 2; “A Great Indignation Meeting in East Cambridge,” Boston Advertiser, August 5, 1873, 2.

6  “Report of the Joint Special Committee … to Consider the Expediency of Establishing a State Board of Health,” Massachusetts Senate Documents 1869, no. 340 (May 22, 1869), qtd. in Barbara Gutman Rosenkrantz, Public Health and the State: Changing Views in Massachusetts, 1843–1936 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 52–53; George C. Burpee and W. O. Robson, John M. Tyler et al, Petitioners, vs. John P. Squire et al, Respondents, the Official Record of the State Board of Health of Massachusetts: Together with a Phonographic Report of the Evidence and Arguments at the Hearing (Cambridge, MA: Welch, Bigelow, and Co., 1874), 3.

7  Arthur Gilman, ed., The Cambridge of Eighteen Hundred and Ninety-Six: A Picture of the City and Its Industries Fifty Years after Its Incorporation (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1896), 371–73.

8  Burpee and Robson, Official Record of the State Board of Health, 55, 62; “The Great Business Interests of Cambridge: The Slaughtering and Rendering Works of John P. Squire & Co.,” Cambridge Chronicle, December 5, 1874, 1; Susan E. Maycock, East Cambridge, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 202–5.

9  Rosenkrantz, Public Health and the State, 65–66; Third Annual Report of the State Board of Health of Massachusetts (Boston: Wright and Porter, 1872), 2–5, 224–45.

10  Dominic A. Pacyga, Slaughterhouse: Chicago’s Union Stock Yard and the World It Made (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), chap. 2; Pamela Young Lee, ed., Meat, Modernity and the Rise of the Slaughterhouse (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2008).

11  Ronald M. Labbé and Jonathan Lurie, The Slaughterhouse Cases: Regulation, Reconstruction and the Fourteenth Amendment, abridged ed. (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005).

12  Burpee and Robson, Official Record of the State Board of Health, 4.

13  “Miller’s River: Two Interesting Letters from the Boston Advertiser,” Cambridge Chronicle, January 31, 1874, 2.

14  Christine Meisner Rosen, “Differing Perceptions of the Value of Pollution Abatement across Time and Place: Balancing Doctrine in Pollution Nuisance Law, 1840–1906,” Law and History Review 11, no. 2 (Fall 1993): 303–81.

15  Maycock, East Cambridge, 35–51. On filling tidal flats, constructing real estate, and transforming the environment throughout New England, see Christopher L. Pastore, Between Land and Sea: The Atlantic Coast and the Transformation of New England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Michael Rawson, Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), chap. 5; and Nancy S. Seasholes, Gaining Ground: A History of Landmaking in Boston (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

16  Burpee and Robson, Official Record of the State Board of Health, 18.

17  Ibid., 58.

18  Ibid., 57.

19  Ibid., 197.

20  Ibid., 122.

21  Ibid., 22.

22  Ibid., 259.

23  Ibid., 70.

24  Ibid., 248.

25  Sixth Annual Report of the State Board of Health of Massachusetts (Boston: Wright and Potter, 1875), 10.

26  On varieties and purposes of medical maps, especially their illustration of arguments about etiology, see Susan Schulten, Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), chap. 3; Owen Whooley, Knowledge in the Age of Cholera (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 116–21; Saul Jarcho, “Yellow Fever, Cholera, and the Beginnings of Medical Cartography,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 25, no. 2 (1970): 131–42.

27  Sixth Annual Report of the Board of Health of the City of Boston (Boston: Rockwell and Church, 1878), 3.

28  Second Annual Report of the State Board of Health of New York (Albany: Weed, Parsons and Co., 1882), 368.

29  “The Plague Spots around the City,” Harper’s Weekly, August 20, 1881, 562; Thomas Nast, “The Governor and the People of New York Defied,” Harper’s Weekly, August 13, 1881, cover.

30  “The Pest at Hunter’s Point,” Harper’s Weekly, August 6, 1881, 538.

31  Quotations are from “The Pest at Hunter’s Point,” Harper’s Weekly, August 6, 1881, 530–31. On the meaning of smoke in nineteenth-century America, see Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives.

32  Thomas Nast, “Let Us Have a Clean Sweep All around New York: The Next Task for Hercules Coleman,” Harper’s Weekly, August 20, 1881, cover; “A Patient Sufferer—To Patient by Half,” Daily Graphic, August 23, 1881, cover.

33  “Hunter’s Point,” Harper’s Weekly, September 17, 1881, 635.

34  William Allen Rogers, “The Victims of Hunter’s Point: How the Foul Odors Aggravate the Miseries of the Sick Room,” Harper’s Weekly, August 20, 1881, 565; William Allen Rogers, “The Death Cauldron at Hunter’s Point,” Harper’s Weekly, August 13, 1881, 552–53.

35  Will Carleton, “That Swamp of Death,” Harper’s Weekly, September 17, 1881, cover (emphasis in original).

36  Franc B. Wilkie, “Walks about Chicago” and “Army and Miscellaneous Sketches” (Chicago: Church, Goodman and Donnelley, 1869), 33.

37  Ibid., 34–35.

38  “Report of Chief Engineer E. S. Chesbrough,” in Annual Report of the Board of Public Works, 1872, 100, qtd. in Louise Carroll Wade, Chicago’s Pride: The Stockyards, Packingtown, and Environs in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 130–31.

39  The 990 figure is from A. T. Andreas, History of Chicago: From the Earliest Period to the Present Time (Chicago: A. T. Andreas, 1884–86), 2:552. On the creation of the Board of Health, see Andreas, History of Chicago 2:549–53, quotation on p. 552; Bessie Louise Pierce, A History of Chicago, vol. 3, The Rise of a Modern City, 1871–1893 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957), 320; Wade, Chicago’s Pride, 133–34; and Jennifer Koslow, “Public Health,” in The Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago, ed. Janice C. Reiff, Ann Durkin Keating, and James R. Grossman (Chicago: Chicago Historical Society, 2005), www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1020.html.

40  Chicago Tribune, July 27, 1872, 4; Wade, Chicago’s Pride, 134.

41  Dominic A. Pacyga, Chicago: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 77–86; Harold L. Platt, Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 163–75; Christine Meisner Rosen, The Limits of Power: Great Fires and the Process of City Growth in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

42  “Thursday’s Stench,” Chicago Tribune, July 14, 1877, 8; “The South Fork,” Chicago Tribune, July 17, 1877, 3; “The Health-Commissioner and the Mayor,” Chicago Tribune, July 18, 1877, 4.

43  “South Fork”; Executive Committee Minutes, Volume 1, 8/21/1874–6/3/1889, Citizens’ Association Records, Chicago History Museum Research Center, Chicago.

44  “The Courts,” Chicago Tribune, June 7, 1878.

45  Ibid.; “The Courts,” Chicago Tribune, June 8, 1878, 3.

46  “The Courts,” June 8, 1978.

47  Ibid.; “The Stench Nuisance,” Chicago Tribune, June 9, 1878. See also Pacyga, Slaughterhouse, 59.

48  “The Courts,” Chicago Tribune, June 26, 1878, 7; “The Stench Nuisances,” Chicago Tribune, June 19, 1878.

49  On the lay public’s ability to generate hard evidence of pollution through photographs of smoke and recording measurements with Ringelmann Charts, see Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives, chap. 4.

50  Andrew Hurley, “Creating Ecological Wastelands: Oil Pollution in New York City, 1870–1900,” Journal of Urban History 20, no. 3 (May 1994): 340–64.

CHAPTER EIGHT: DIRTY CITIES, SMELLY BODIES

1  Henry Smith Williams, “Unwholesome Environs of Brooklyn,” Harper’s Weekly, August 4, 1894, 726.

2  Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Knopf, 1955); Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1870–1920 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishers, 1967); Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003); T. J. Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York: HarperCollins, 2009).

3  Williams, “Unwholesome Environs.”

4  Frank Allaben, “Note by the Publisher,” in Stephen Smith, The City That Was (New York: Frank Allaben, 1911), 7–8.

5  Smith, City That Was, 17–18.

6  Isaac D. Rawlings, William A. Evans, Gottfried Koehler, and Baxter K. Richardson, The Rise and Fall of Disease in Illinois (Springfield, IL: State Department of Public Health, 1927), 2:336–37.

7  Barbara Gutman Rosenkrantz, Public Health and the State: Changing Views in Massachusetts, 1843–1936 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), esp. chap. 4–epilogue; Judith Walzer Leavitt, The Healthiest City: Milwaukee and the Politics of Health Reform (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 243–45; Linda Nash, Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), chap. 3.

8  Edward Ewing Pratt, Industrial Causes of Congestion of Population in New York City (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1911), 9–10.

9  Thomas Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977).

10  US Bureau of the Census, Abstract of the Thirteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1910 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1913), 95.

11  Pratt, Industrial Causes, 20.

12  Richard Walker and Robert D. Lewis, “Beyond the Crabgrass Frontier: Industry and the Spread of North American Cities, 1850–1950,” Journal of Historical Geography 27, no. 1 (2001): 3–19; Robert D. Lewis, “Running Rings around the City: North American Industrial Suburbs, 1850–1950,” in Changing Suburbs: Foundation, Form and Function, ed. Richard Harris and Peter Larkham (London: Routledge, 1999), 146–67.

13  Pratt, Industrial Causes, 192; Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 242.

14  “For Sale—Real Estate” advertisement, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 11, 1882, 3; “For Sale—Lots—Ozone Park” advertisement, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 30, 1882, 5; “Ozone Park. Near This City” advertisement, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 11, 1882, 3.

15  Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, chaps. 3–6.

16  Williams, “Unwholesome Environs.”

17  Ibid.

18  Algie Martin Simons, Packingtown (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr and Co., 1899), 11.

19  William Hardman, A Trip to America (London: T. Vickers Wood, 1884), 92–95. On tourism and the spectacle of industrial slaughter, see J. Philip Gruen, Manifest Destinations: Cities and Tourists of the Nineteenth-Century American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), 101–4.

20  Franc B. Wilkie, Walks about Chicago (Chicago: Belford, Clarke and Co., 1882), 27–32.

21  “Way to Kill Off Odors,” Chicago Daily, November 9, 1897, 12.

22  “East Side Street Vendors,” New York Times, July 30, 1893, 17.

23  Ibid.; William Leach, The Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage, 1994), 62–64 (on window shopping); Susanne Friedberg, Fresh: A Perishable History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2000), chap. 1 on refrigeration.

24  Connie Y. Chiang, “Monterey-by-the-Smell: Odors and Social Conflict on the California Coastline,” Pacific Historical Review 73, no. 2 (May 2004): 182–214; Constance Classen, “The Odor of the Other: Olfactory Symbolism and Cultural Categories,” Ethos 20, no. 2 (June 1992): 133–66; Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synott, Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (London: Routledge, 1994), esp. 165–72; Mark M. Smith, How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation and the Senses (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); and Anthony Synnott, The Body Social: Symbolism, Self and Society (London: Routledge, 1993), esp. 195–202.

25  Simons, Packingtown, 9.

26  William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes (New York: Boni and Live-right, 1889), 67, 252.

27  Upton Sinclair, The Jungle ([Pasadena, CA?]: Upton Sinclair, 1920), 155; James Harvey Young, “The Pig That Fell into the Privy: Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Meat Inspection Amendments of 1906,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 59 (1985): 467–80.

28  Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House: With Autobiographical Notes (New York: Macmillan, 1911), 98–99; Sylvia Hood Washington, Packing Them In: An Archaeology of Environmental Racism in Chicago, 1865–1954 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005), esp. chaps. 3 and 4; and David Naguib Pellow, Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), chap. 2.

29  McDowell qtd. in Pellow, Garbage Wars, 21.

30  Suellen Hoy, Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 72–78; Maureen A. Flanagan, “The City Profitable, the City Livable: Environmental Policy, Gender, and Power in Chicago in the 1910s,” Journal of Urban History 22 (January 1996): 163–90; Maureen A. Flanagan, Seeing with Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1871–1933 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), chap. 5; Paula Baker, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780–1920,” American Historical Review 89 (June 1984): 620–47.

31  “In and about the City,” New York Times, November 22, 1884; “Dangers to Public Health,” New York Times, December 17, 1884; “Fighting Bad Odors,” New York Times, December 20, 1884; “Our Dirty, Dusty Streets: Suggestions as to How They Might Be Cleaned,” New York Times, May 1, 1890; “Municipal Housekeeping,” Outlook 51, no. 3 (January 19, 1895): 99; Hoy, Chasing Dirt, 74–75; Felice Batlan, “The Ladies’ Health Protective Association: Lay Lawyers and Urban Cause Lawyering,” Akron Law Review 41 (2008): 701–31.

32  “In and about the City”; “Dangers to Public Health.”

33  Julia Guarneri, “Changing Strategies for Child Welfare, Enduring Beliefs about Childhood: The Fresh Air Fund, 1877–1926,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 11, no. 1 (January 2012): 27–70; Barry Ross Harrison Muchnick, “Nature’s Republic: Fresh Air Reform and the Moral Ecology of Citizenship in Turn of the Century America” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2010).

34  Walter Shepard Ufford, Fresh Air Charity in the United States (New York: Bonnell, Silver and Co., 1897), 1.

35  Meghan Crnic, “Seeking the Salubrious Sea: The Health and Environments of Urban American Families, 1870–1930” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2013); Gregg Mitman, Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), chap. 1.

36  R. Dale Grinder, “The Battle for Clean Air: The Smoke Problem in Post–Civil War America,” in Pollution and Reform in American Cities, 1870–1930, ed. Martin V. Melosi (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980); Christine Meisner Rosen, “Businessmen against Pollution in Late Nineteenth Century Chicago,” Business History Review 69, no. 3 (Autumn 1995): 351–97; Adam Rome, “Coming to Terms with Pollution: The Language of Environmental Reform, 1865–1915,” Journal of Environmental History 1, no. 3 (July 1996): 6–28; David Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives: Environmentalists, Engineers, and Air Quality in America, 1881–1951 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

37  Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives, chap. 4.

38  Gail Cooper, Air-Conditioning America: Engineers and the Controlled Environment, 1900–1960 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), chaps. 1–3.

39  Muchnick, “Nature’s Republic,” 138–43; Crnic, “Seeking the Salubrious Sea,” chap. 2.

CONCLUSION

1  Ken Ward Jr., “DEP Inspectors Describe Early Scene at Freedom Leak Site,” Charleston Gazette-Mail, January 13, 2014, www.wvgazettemail.com/News/201401130118; Andrew J. Whelton, LaKia McMillan, Matt Connell, Keven M. Kelley, Jeff P. Gill, Kevin D. White, Rahul Gupta, Rajashi Dey, and Caroline Novy, “Residential Tap Water Contamination Following the Freedom Industries Chemical Spill: Perceptions, Water Quality, and Health Impacts,” Environmental Science and Technology 49, no. 2 (2015): 813–23.

2  Whelton et al., “Residential Tap Water Contamination,” 819; Christy Spackman, “Crossing Boundaries: Making Sense with the Sense-able,” Somatosphere, http://somatosphere.net/2015/11/crossing-boundaries-the-case-for-making-sense-with-the-sense-able.html.

3  Noga Morag-Levine, Chasing the Wind: Regulating Air Pollution in the Common Law State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 129. On the changing vernacular of nuisance, see William J. Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), esp. 62.

4  Susan Saulny, “Odd Smells in New Orleans, Thoughts of the Gulf,” New York Times, May 14, 2010.

5  Paul Riede, “Camillus Residents Sue Honeywell over Dumping of Onondaga Lake Waste,” Syracuse.com, March 18, 2013, www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2013/03/camillus_residents_sue_honeywe.html; New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, “Onondaga Lake Superfund Site,” www.dec.ny.gov/chemical/8668.html.

6  Christopher Sellers, “Factory as Environment: Industrial Hygiene, Professional Collaboration and the Modern Sciences of Pollution,” Environmental History Review 18, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 55–83. On the difficulty of understanding the multiple variables that lead to illness, especially asthma, see Gregg Mitman, Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), chap. 1; Julie Sze, Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); Michelle Murphy, Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), esp. chap. 4; Jongmin Lee, “CHESS Lessons: Controversy and Compromise in the Making of the EPA,” in Toxic Airs: Body, Place and Planet in Historical Perspective, ed. James Rodger Fleming and Ann Johnson (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), 127–51; and the ongoing work of the Asthma Files, http://theasthmafiles.org.