Griscom, John Hoskins (14 Aug. 1809-28 Apr. 1874), physician and sanitarian, was born in New York, New York, the son of John Griscom, an educator and chemist, and Abigail Hoskins. He attended the Collegiate School of Friends and the New York High School, a school owned and run by his father, where he absorbed the elder Griscom's Quaker, philanthropic, and scientific outlook. After studying with anatomist John D. Godman and surgeon Valentine Mott and attending medical lectures at Rutgers Medical College, Griscom transferred to the University of Pennsylvania where he received his M.D. in 1832. Appointed assistant physician to the New York Dispensary in 1833, he was promoted to physician a year later. He married Henrietta Peale, daughter of painter Rembrandt Peale, in 1835; they had eight children. He purchased the goodwill of a retiring New York City physician in 1837, acquiring a practice that he maintained until his death.
In addition to his private practice, Griscom held scientific and medical posts throughout his life, including professor of chemistry at the College of Pharmacy in New York from 1836 to 1838 and physician to the New York Hospital from 1843 to 1870. In 1840 he published Animal Mechanism and Physiology, which ran through several editions. His participation in the founding of the New York Academy of Medicine in 1846, his service as its vice president in 1854, and his work with the American Medical Association demonstrated his commitment to improving the status of the medical profession.
Griscom believed that, through the analysis of vital statistics, humankind could understand nature's laws and thereby design appropriate sanitary reforms to prevent illness and premature death. During his tenure as city inspector and as head of the New York City Health Department (1842), Griscom improved the reliability of the city's mortality statistics. He accomplished this by successfully promoting an ordinance requiring a city inspector's permit before the dead could be transported beyond the city limits. Although he was removed from these posts after a year because of his plans for reorganizing the structure of the city health department, he used the information gathered during these municipal appointments to form the basis of his most important work, The Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Population of New York (1845). Modeled on Edwin Chadwick's work on Great Britain, this report correlated the higher morbidity rate among the laboring class with their overcrowded, unventilated tenement living conditions. For Griscom, tenement reform required the provision of better ventilation so that the inhabitants might live in accordance with nature's laws. Cramped, unventilated spaces forced people to live in close quarters and breathe vitiated air,leading to a progression from declining morals to depression, illness, and unemployment.
Griscom's solution to this problem reveals his pietistic education and utilitarian outlook; for him, improving the physical health and moral sensibilities of the poor through education and legislation would benefit society as a whole. The poor, once freed from the ills of tenement living, would become useful and productive members of society. In The Uses and Abuses of Air (1850), he again stressed the importance of proper ventilation and offered concrete solutions for achieving it. Griscom's belief that immigrants and prisoners would benefit from these reforms is shown in the medical and sanitary rules he developed for the Emigrant Refuge and Hospital on Ward's Island while serving as Commissioner of Emigration (1848-1851) and in his well-known report, "Prison Hygiene" (1868) for the New York Prison Association.
Griscom's influence extended beyond the confines of New York City. He corresponded with Massachusetts sanitarians Lemuel Shattuck and Edward Jarvis. In 1859 he presided over the Third National Quarantine Convention, confirming his national reputation. Griscom remained active in New York sanitary reform until his death. His tireless letter campaign contributed to the success of the Metropolitan Health Act of 1866, which established a Board of Health for New York City and served as a model for cities nationwide. Through his writings, lectures, and public service, John Hoskins Griscom helped lay the foundation for mid-nineteenth-century urban public health reform in the United States. His ideas came to fruition in the late nineteenth century with tenement reform laws and in the writings of later reformers including those of Jacob Riis. He died in New York City.
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Among Griscom's many striking departures from conventional middle-class wisdom was his refusal to blame the poor for their wretched housing. He knew that lack of fresh water and adequate sanitation made it impossible for residents to keep clean and pious homes, even if they wanted to, and he even declined to blame laboring men for escaping from such hovels to the grog shops. For Griscom, dirt was a symptom of poverty, not its cause.
On the other hand,he didn't blame the rich, as the land reformers did. Rather, he appealed to them to provide decent housing, not just as 'a measure of humanity, of justice to the poor,' but as a matter of self-interest. Bad housing meant sick workers and sick workers meant lower profits, higher relief outlays, and higher taxes. Ultimately, too, slums fostered the growth of 'a class in the community more difficult to govern, more disposed to robbery, mobs, and other lawless acts, and less accessible to the influence of religious and moral instruction.' Griscom was convinced that such rational appeals would have weight because the problem seemed to stem from lack of understanding: 'one half of the world does not know how the other half lives.'
The comfortable half didn't pay much attention to Griscom, however, until rudely reminded of the costs of inaction by the cholera epidemic of 1849 which claimed over 5,000 lives. Bodies lay in the streets for days. Eventually they were removed over to Randall's Island and dumped in an open trench, at which point a gruesome public health device came into play as thousands of rats swam over and gnawed the flesh from the carcasses before they rotted.
As in 1832, many declared the cholera God's retribution for sin, but this time many others riposted that moralizing was no longer a sufficient response to social crisis. Instead, the city had to take an active response to reforming the environment. It would take a long time for the new attitude to influence municipal institutions. But Griscom kept hammering at the need for a sanitary police force throughout the 1850s, and was joined by other activist physicians, civic-minded businessmen, and reformers who pointed out that a series of violent upheavals which culminated in the great draft riots of 1863 were themselves a function of a degraded environment.
Finally, with a cholera epidemic approaching, the state legislature, in 1866, created a Metropolitan Board of Health and gave it extraordinary powers to fight the scourge. The ensuing mobilization helped keep New York's death toll under 500 - one-tenth the fatalities of the 1849 epidemic, despite a one-third increase population since then. Thanks in considerable measure to John Griscom - an unsung civic hero - New York City had erected a milestone in the history of public health."
