1870s

Growth of state boards of health, following examples of NY City Metropolitan Board (1866) and Mass. State Board (1869) and founding of NY Public Health Assn in NY in 1872. By 1879, 17 state boards in existence, 9 in south, where cholera and especially yellow fever epidemics “provided the main energies for their formation.” They remained ineffectual and unfinanced paper organizations until the yellow fever epidemic of 1878 led state legislatures to empower them, especially to impose and enforce quarantines. Sanitation of secondary importance, with southern legislatures content to relegate it to private charities (Humphreys, 55-57). No women or blacks served on southern state health boarded through 1905 (59). In “Yellow Fever bill” of 1879, southern Congressman argued that only a national quarantine administered by a national board of health could control yellow fever, since locally imposed quarantines would never be maintained to the extent they compromised commerce. Northern congressmen, under thumb of their states’ own quarantine boards, opposed the bill as violation of states’ rights insensitive to local conditions, as understood by local authorities. A much weaker bill creating the National Board of Heath did pass in 1879 (62-64).