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The Town & the City: Lowell before and after The Civil War

Originally created to be a digital archive for Lowell documents from 1826 to 1861, this website has grown to cover many periods and events in Lowell's history.

"The capital of the poor man" - The History of Public Health in Lowell

“The capital of the poor man” is a series of historical examinations by Brad MacGowan that will be published to the web as they are written. At this time, the first twelve are available here. The goal of this series of articles is to chronicle some of the history of medicine and public health in Lowell, and all of the social, political, psychological, and economic issues involved in the health of a city over a long period of history.

The capital of the poor man is his health.
The interest which he receives upon his capital is the wages of each day's labor. . . .
The health of the people is the real foundation upon which the prosperity of the city depends.
James C. Abbott Mayor of Lowell, Massachusetts Jan. 4, 1887

Introduction - "The capital of the poor man"

Part 1 - almost totally destroyed by the great sickness

            c. 13,000 BC to 1603 AD and 1604 to 1726 AD (Indians and first contact with Europeans)

Part 2 - a curious medley of well-filled phials of medicines

            1721 to 1822 (East Chelmsford)

Part 3 - a pest-house prepared

            1822 to 1824 (A stranger with smallpox)

Part 4 - - indeed a fairy scene

            1825 to 1836 (Local government and public health)

Part 5 - the general tenor and amount of our success

            1837 (A smallpox outbreak)

Part 6 - - a few feeble constitutions

            1837 to 1850 (The health of the operatives controversy)

Part 7 - there is a wide-spread skepticism

            1832 to 1861 (Physicians and medicine in early Lowell)

Part 8 - among our Irish population

            1849 (A cholera epidemic)

Part 9 - this severe visitation

            1871 (A smallpox epidemic)

Part 10 - this instructive picture

            1890/1891 (A typhoid epidemic)

Part 11 -  the necessities of the many

            1890 to 1920 (The Golden Era of Bacteriology and the Progressive Era)

Part 12 - in the face of probes

            1920 to 1924 (The first years of the Isolation Hospital)

 

The Introduction through Part 12 are available in pdf format.and as webpages.

The webpages -

PDFs of Parts 1 through 12 -

Medicine Meets Industry: A Historical Look at Lowell Massachusetts.
By Lewis S. Albert and Robert Weible, Physician East, January 1981, pp. 20 - 26. (Center for Lowell History, Documents Collections).

Introduction:

     “For fifty years following the Revolutionary War, the land that compromises Lowell remained a typical New England agricultural village, very similar to the kind of community that is so well preserved at Old Sturbridge Village today. When a number of small industrial concerns began to appear along the Concord River In the early 1800s, few could have realized that these isolated industries foreshadowed events that were to turn a rural community into a town, a town into the third city incorporated in Massachusetts, and Lowell into the most important textile manufacturing city in the country by
1840. The industrial experiment succeeded beyond anyone's expectations.

     Throughout its dramatic growth, much of Lowell's social history has run parallel with
its advances in medicine. The founding of each of Lowell's hospitals, for instance, coincides with a specific period of growth and change in the city's industrial and social history. The Lowell Corporation Hospital was formed during the early "Mill Girl" era, and in many ways represented the culmination of that age with the promise and idealism of the Lowell System. St. John's met the needs of the early Irish immigration era when industrialization was outgrowing even the early manufacturer's best intentions. Lowell General was founded in response to the problems of urban sprawl, speaking of the city's phenomenal growth and latter day prosperity.

     Medical men around the country were among the first social reformers to protest conditions in industrial cities, and unlike any other educated group in Lowell, it
was the city's physicians who came into close contact with the effects of industrialization on a daily basis, leaving their records as a valuable and objective source of information for historians today.”

Board of Health Meeting Minutes 1888 - 1893

 I am in the process of adding minutes from the meetings of the Lowell Board of Health from 1871 to 1900.

They are in three bound volumes:

1871 to 1888

1888 to 1893

1893 to 1900

The years 1888 to 1893 have been added first.

Board of Health Meeting Minutes 1889

BOH 1888-93 p 59
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Board of Health Meeting Minutes 1890

BOH 1888-93 p 152
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