Collection: Record of Sanitary Inquiry

Description: The Record of Sanitary Inquiry documents the work of the Council of Hygiene and Public Health, a group of doctors working on behalf of the reform-minded Citizens’ Association to investigate New York City’s living conditions during the mid-19th century. With the proliferation of unregulated tenement housing, the city’s poor were crowded into unsanitary conditions that contributed to the spread of diseases and an overall poor quality of life. Responding to this public health crisis, the physicians of the Special Council conducted a block-by-block—even house-by-house—survey of the city’s living conditions. A numbered questionnaire solicited information about the block’s terrain, infrastructure (e.g., sewage and garbage disposal, street maintenance, ventilation, and water supply), housing, tenement conditions, instances of disease, and proximity to schools and churches, as well as locations of perceived moral and physical impurity like factories, slaughterhouses, saloons, and houses of prostitution. Surveyors were organized into 29 districts, and each district’s designated lead physician recorded the team’s responses in a volume accompanied by detailed, color-coded maps. The survey results recorded in these volumes provide the raw data for a granular understanding of New York City’s living conditions around the time of the Civil War.