Don’t you just hate when you’re doing research and
what you find out leads not to answers, but more questions? Such was my experience over the past two
weekends as I dug deeper into the cholera epidemics in Buffalo.
After sitting in the damp and chilly bleachers
watching my son’s football team get stomped on by a team they were supposed to
beat, I ran over to the Buffalo History Museum, still clad in multiple fleece
lined layers, to take a look at some municipal reports for the Erie County
Poorhouse. I was interested to see if
there would be any discussion of the cholera epidemics (of 1832 and 1849) and their
impact on the poorhouse. As I have
mentioned before, the Erie County Board of Supervisors Reports for this period
are hand written and only available on reverse negative microfilm. With only an hour left before the Museum’s
library closed, I knew my best strategy was to quickly review the documents,
identify the pages pertaining to the cholera epidemics or the poorhouse and come
back at a later date for a more thorough examination.
I rushed into the Museum’s research library and went
straight to the shelf that held my rolls of microfilm. I nodded a brief greeting to the staff so
that I could make the most of what little time I had left before the doors were
closed for the evening. After quickly
feeding the microfilm into the machine, I realized I had loaded it upside
down. When the film was finally loaded
correctly, I wasted a good bit of time fumbling with the machine trying to
remember which levers controlled the quality and size of the image.
I did not find any mention of the cholera epidemic
in the Board of Supervisors report of 1832, the year of the first major pandemic. I found that very odd because the disease had
such a disastrous impact on many large cities.
The hand written reports were extremely difficult to read and there is
always the possibility that I missed something important. Also, it may be that there was no time to
record any details of the epidemic, as it struck so quickly and with such
ferocity. I will examine the reports
again and also take another look at the reports for 1833 in the event that the
Board needed time to process the events of the previous year before they could
evaluate the impact of the cholera epidemic on the city.
I scrolled carefully on to the year 1849, stopping
every time I saw the shapes that I came to know spelled the words poorhouse,
poor, or cholera. Finally in a meeting
dated October 8, 1849 there was some discussion of this disease. Members of the Board of Supervisors moved to
give the recently (and temporarily) established Board of Health the authority
to employ nurses and procure what supplies were necessary to deal with the
epidemic. They further moved to make the
Board of Health permanent and give them discretion to set quarantines where they
were needed to contain the disease. I
thought that was particularly interesting because physicians were arguing at
the time that cholera was not contagious and quarantines were not
necessary. Also, because of Buffalo’s
strategic location on the Erie Canal, quarantines would have brought commerce
to a screeching halt. However, the
impact of quarantines on economic well being of the city was not mentioned in
the proceedings.
Beyond that report, there was no mention of the disease
itself, how many individuals had died, or if the epidemic was abating at
all. The rest of the account focused on
which municipal entity was financially responsible for the cost incurred by the
Board of Health. Some argued that the
Act of 1832, which established a temporary Board of Health to deal with the
cholera epidemic of that year, maintained that all expenses relating to cholera
and other “malignant diseases” be paid for by the county. Others insisted that the city of Buffalo
should take on the burden of said costs.
There was also a discussion concerning the Board of
Health established in the town of Evans to contain the spread of small
pox. It was argued that Boards of Health
should only be established to contain “malignant diseases”. Small pox was considered a “contagious
disease” and, it was argued, if they allowed a Board of Health to be
established to contain contagious diseases, what would stop another town from
establishing a Board of Health to contain other diseases such as whooping
cough! I found it very interesting that
members of the Board of Supervisors were more concerned with malignant diseases
(malignancy is the tendency of any medical condition to get progressively
worse) than contagious diseases (those passed from one organism to another via
direct or indirect contact). I am
becoming very interested in the public perception of illness during this period
before the germ theory of disease was understood and accepted.
The next logical place to investigate the impact of
cholera on the Erie County Poorhouse was the actual records from the
institution. There are no surviving
inmate or hospital records for the year 1849, so I looked through the inmate records for 1832 in
the hopes of finding some mention of the disease. Again, my investigation yielded very little information. Twenty eight inmates died at the ECPH that year compared to 14 in 1831
and 17 in 1833. The number of deaths in 1832 still seems low for an epidemic year. Cause of death was not usually listed in
these records, although cholera was sometimes written in the margin as a
cause of death in later years. However, 11 of the 28 deaths (39%)
occurred between May and September (warmer months when the epidemic would have
been at its peak). These mortality statistics suggest that the ECPH was
not being used as a pesthouse (a place to house infected patients) during the
cholera epidemic of 1832. It also appears that the institution's remote
location with respect to the rest of the city (and likely the use of a well on
the property) may have offered some protection from the spread of the
disease. Clearly more research is
needed.
So
my investigation into the primary sources has left me with more questions than
answers (what else is new?). Where were
the people infected with cholera in the city of Buffalo treated? Why did the disease not hit the ECPH harder? What role did the Board of Health have in
managing the epidemic during either pandemic year (1832, or 1849)? What did they learn from the epidemic in 1832
that helped in the containment of the disease in 1849? I’ll keep digging. Stay tuned…
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