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In the 19 th century you could say that conditions for wide spread epidemics were ideal. People lived in hovels barely fit for habitation and probably better suited to livestock than human beings. More often than not people were jammed like animals into these dwellings, sometimes more than a half dozen to a room designed for two or three. And the conditions inside such a dwelling were ideal for sickness. Sometimes barely sheltered from the elements, these poor souls would huddle in these rooms and eat spoiled meat that they would pay perhaps two or three cents for. Most of these cellars, which were in truth no more than cellars, were most times situated in buildings that were within a stones throw of buildings that housed dozens, and sometimes hundreds of pigs.
Naturally this was not the healthiest of places to live. Hundreds of thousands of people died and most were left for days wherever they fell. Eventually, after a few days usually, the bodies were collected and brought to a place called Randall's Island, the city cemetery. It was here that these leagues of unfortunate people were laid to rest. In keeping with the vulgarity of these times the bodies of the dead were deposited in long, wide trenches sometimes hundreds of yards in length.
It was in these trenches the body was piled upon body usually all the way up to within a foot of the surface of the hole. This was the lone reason that the disease did not spread even more, from the rotting carcasses. One other contributing factor to the diseases spread was the numerous animal carcasses that were around from butchering, daily these carcasses, their parts, and the animals offal was dumped into the river, where they were unable to escape due to returning tides. Doctors of the time were anything but successful in their treatment of cholera, which was the foremost killer of the time. The treatments prescribed by the doctors were as varied and ridiculous as the doctors themselves. The staple treatments of the time were bleeding the patient, which is draining them of a quantity of blood, and calomel.
But several inane treatments sprung up left and right in the scramble to subdue the disease. Some physicians swore by electric shock treatment, sulfur pills, tobacco-smoke enemas, strychnine, aconite, or morphine. One doctor even immersed his comatose victims in tubs of ice water. Needless to say that much progress has been made in the field of disease treatment since those dark days. These days we have standardized practices that eliminate the possibility of treatments as archaic and brutal as bleeding a patient. The development of drugs and safe ways they could be administered were also an invaluable addition to the medical field.
But a major accomplishment is the evolution of mindset of the common man, which is an invaluable commodity in the time of panic that an epidemic can spark. We have truly come a long way. Bibliography:
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