Memory plays an immense trick on most of us who write about the history of New York. We often depend on memoirs that shroud its past in a glorious aura that contrasts dramatically with our view of today's city. In the writings of politicians, authors, and even historians, the city of the last generation seems marvelously exciting, exhilarating, organized and wholesome. In contrast, today's city seems overwhelmingly burdened with signs and symptoms of decay and dissolution. In the early 1970s, Otto Bettman, who collected and catalogued thousands of photographs of nineteenth century New York, characterized this process as the creation of a "benevolent haze" which leaves "us with the image of an ebullient, carefree America...."

One means of challenging and questioning our collective memory is to provide broad access to the primary sources and data that document our city’s public health history. Three sets of published but relatively rare and, to date, hard to plumb documents capture changes in the physical and social condition of the city and document the creation and transformation of the New York City Department of Health, one the most important institutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the 1865 Citizen’s Association of New York report on the Sanitary Condition of the City, the Annual Reports of the New York City Department of Health (NYCDOH) from its creation in 1865 through 1920, and John Shaw Billing’s massive 1890 compilation of the Vital Statistics of New York City and Brooklyn for the U.S. Census Office, the first federal survey of disease in a complex urban setting. These are the materials that will form the backbone of our site, "Health, Wealth, and the City: Records of the Department of Health and the Nation’s Urban Landscape." Once linked to the NYCDOH’s site, which will post photographs of the department, this collection will provide a rich pictorial, textual, and statistical account of health and wealth in New York City.

The data and documents contained in this planned collection provide a unique opportunity to flesh out the rise and transformation of one of the most significant social institutions in modern history: the New York City Department of Health, the nation’s first continuous health department. Captured within the reports of sanitary inspectors and page after page of numbers are more than descriptions or quantifications of changing urban problems: the reports in this collection capture changing ways of thinking about disease, of combating and preventing disease, and of the links between health and larger cultural, social, political, economic forces.

The first document, Sanitary Condition of the City, was produced in 1864, when the Citizens' Association, a group of prominent New Yorker’s, organized a "Special Council of Hygiene and Public Health." Their prime concern was to document the horrifying changes that had overtaken the City in the previous few decades. The Association organized a district-by-district, block-to-block inspection of living conditions in Manhattan. The Sanitary Condition of the City, published in 1865, is a 360 page indexed volume containing elaborate textual descriptions of each of the Sanitary Districts or neighborhood units. This volume also contains several detailed topographical and neighborhood maps of the city, showing swamps, tenement houses, privies, and the "encroachment of nuisances" by district.

The Annual Reports of the NYCDOH consist of 55 volumes. Each is approximately 200 pages in length. These volumes contain text describing the health conditions of the city and the activities of the different departments of the DOH, such as the Bacteriological Laboratory and the Sanitary Inspection Service. Over time, the activities of these divisions are documented quantitatively, in numerous statistical tables recording in detail the tasks performed. In addition to core data showing appropriations and expenditures for each division or activity of the DOH and morbidity and mortality data by age, neighborhood, and hospital, the Annual Reports provide unique insight into urban life. The reports of Sanitary Inspection, Food and Milk Inspection, Laboratories, and Child Hygiene, for example, carefully document the number of dead horses and other "offal" and "nuisances" removed from city streets; pounds of meat, fish, and fruit condemned and destroyed; the location and number of acres of swamp and marshland drained as part of mosquito prevention and extermination efforts; the number of midwives inspected; and the number and results of children medically inspected in the schools.

Similarly, Billing’s Vital Statistics of New York City and Brooklyn is a 529 page report presenting comprehensive tables of vital statistics from 1885 to 1890 by Sanitary Districts. This federal Census report carefully documents population and mortality by wards and sanitary districts, reporting figures by race, nativity, and age; mortality by occupation and gender; and infant mortality.

Although published, in its current format this collection documenting the history of public health in a major urban center is virtually inaccessible; users of these invaluable documents have been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information and numbers. The volume of data entry and management required to transform these data and reports into a usable format has been a major barrier to their full exploitation. Consequently, scholars have relied on a slim cross-section of material from these rich documents.

This digital collection, then, will house the text of the separate reports, data tables, and maps and photographs. After development, this web site will contain an image map (with text alternative navigators) that will guide the user to each section of the collection. Textual material (including Table of Contents and Indexes) will be converted into HTML format. Users navigating this section of the collection will be presented with two search options:

1.) The user may browse the table of contents and/or site index to link directly to various pages on the site, or

2.) The user may perform a Boolean search of the document texts, limiting the search by volume, range of volumes or by date range, in the collection. This search will generate a list of site links that match the search parameters.

For example, a user interested in tracing changes in the nature of Sanitary Inspection might browse through the indexes and table of context of each of the NYCDOH Annual Reports. For the Annual Report for 1910-11, the user might choose to move directly from the table of contents to read the detailed descriptions of all sanitary investigations of lodging houses, slaughter houses, and smoking automobiles and to trace changes in the New York City Sanitary Law.

With regard to the data tables, there is great value to preserving the form of the original data. For instance, what the Census Bureau or the NYCDOH chose to measure, how they presented these data, and how the content and the form changed from year to year offers unique insights into the institutional representation of disease, poverty, and the quality of urban life. Therefore, the data tables section of the site will consist of thousands of small datasets that will reflect the original reporting of the information. Our intent is to allow the user may download each dataset in either flat-file database or spreadsheet format. But because there is also tremendous value in the data themselves -- in the evidence they represent -- we will develop an interface that will allow the user to ask questions of these data, treating them as a unified whole. This collection, then, represents far more than the sum of its parts.

The user will have two ways to find and use the data:

1.) The user may view tables as they appeared in the original document as part of the HTML document. Throughout the HTML text, there will be hot links to the data tables. Clicking on a hot link will bring up a pop-up window will appear allowing the user of view the content of the statistical table. There would also be links to the database portion of the website for the user to be able to download the data tables as a dataset, if so desired.

2.) The user may begin in the database portion of the web site to view or download individual datasets. Here, the user will find a listing for each database, categorized by title, source or sources, and discrete variables.

3.) The user may use a custom graphical user interface (GUI) that will allow for the selection of specific datasets, data records, and data variables to create a custom set of data points. This custom GUI would be built using forms-based controls. From the information provided by the user a structured query language (SQL) query would be generated to compile the appropriate data results. This information would then be displayed for the user in tabular format, as well as, allow the user to download the results as a dataset for their own personal use.

Building on the previous example, we can see here how the text and data can supplement each other in important ways. The scholar reading the text describing the general investigations of the Sanitary Inspection Division in the 1910-11 report will find a link to a database detailing each specific sanitary complaint received by the DOH and the action taken for that year. By selecting that link, the user will move from the text to the database, which the user may download or print.

Alternatively, the user interested in the work of the Sanitary Inspection Division may explore the data more deliberately. For example, a user interested in tracing infectious disease mortality from 1865 to 1920 could use our interface to query the data to select the desired mortality figures (the user, for example, may only be interested in tuberculosis, typhoid, and diphtheria deaths) and base population for each sanitary district each year. A user might further download and link these data to files documenting sanitary engineering advances and the implementation of targeted public health interventions, such as hospital isolation by district, to determine the relative effect of such different public health interventions on the rate of decline of diseases as different as typhoid and tuberculosis.