Disease, sanitation and the 'lower orders' : perception and reality in Sydney, 1875-1881

Abstract

This is a study in human relationships - of the way in which the ignorance and subsequent fears and prejudices which shape human perceptions of one another are incorporated into the social ties binding together the community as a whole. The thesis is confined geographically to the inner city area within the administrative boundaries of the Sydney City Council.! It takes as its core-period the years between the disease alarms early in 1875 and the smallpox epidemic during the second half of 1881, and from that perspective views the broader sweep of time from mid-century until the early 1890s. It shows an urban community in whose expanding economy and aggregation of population were contained forces of fragmentation and division - geographical, social, and psychological. City growth at a rate faster than the enactment of regulatory controls and provision of local services had been accompanied by a proliferation of aesthetic and sanitary nuisances, caused for example by the expansion of industry, and deficiencies in garbage collection, in drainage and water services. Networks of abutting courts and passageways developed off City main streets, crowded with insanitary tenements and groups of decaying cottage-dwellings, relics from the city's past. The consequent anxieties about city ill-health, and recurring alarms about the likely appearance of epidemic disease, were expressed in a generally-felt dissatisfaction with the achievements of local government sanitary administration. As the experiences of CHOs in attempting to remedy sanitary nuisances make plain, the City Corporation's performance in the field of public health was limited by its powerlessness to undertake necessary sanitary initiatives independently of Parliament. Many outside critics however, aware only of the continuing deficiencies in City health regulation, called for the City Council's replacement by a more energetic metropolitan municipal council, or for its subordination to the directions of government-appointed experts on a board of health. Contemporary understanding of the nature of disease, influenced by miasmic or filth-based explanations of illness, focused community anxieties about disease upon the working class districts of the inner City. The resulting sanitary investigations of these little-known neighbourhoods presented a generalised picture of squalor and unwholesomeness. Apprehensions about disease, together with middle class rationalisations for the existence of poverty, and at the individual level a psychological need among people of all classes to have someone else to look down upon, in turn produced a distorting, stereotyped image of an alien and menacing subgroup of debased humanity within the community - the urban lower orders. The emergence and subsequent impact of the image of the lower orders upon the direction of sanitary endeavour and of public health policy in Sydney forms the core of this thesis. This is the first doctoral thesis to have been based upon the manuscript material on city health in the Sydney Town Hall archives. The City Council's sanitary staff has never before been studied. The CHOs are largely forgotten men. In their many hundreds of reports, however, there lies an invaluable source of information on life - and death - in a nineteenth century city. A chronicle of the principal events dealt with in the thesis may be found in Appendix Eleven.