SCEMS | EMDG | Molly Nebiolo

Sheffield Centre for Early Modern Studies

Constructing Health: Concepts of Well-Being in Early Atlantic Cities

How did everyday people think about and pursue healthiness when they lived in early American cities? My dissertation project tries to answer this question. I argue that public health was integral to the shaping of early American cities and city culture because inhabitants’ ideas of daily healthiness were directly related to the way they interacted with their urbanizing environments. Health, or rather the absence of health, has been studied in these locations through the examination of filth, disease, and disease outbreaks, but my project reimagines these spaces as regularly evolving due to community health initiatives, thereby entrenching public health as an agenda in colonial America.I use social and cultural methodologies to study the pre-planned cities of Philadelphia, Charleston, and Savannah that spans their history from surveying and settlement in the 1670s-80s through the advent of departments of public health in the 1790s. American cities offered English stakeholders the unique opportunity to build entirely new cities rather than adapt existing spaces. Studying the process of their construction and evolution illuminates not only early modern notions of public health but foregrounds the role health played in the formation of distinctly “American” conceptions of health and medicine that emerged by the end of the eighteenth century. This presentation will briefly cover the chapters of my project, from the first chapter on envisioning a “healthful” early colonial cities, to the last few chapters that highlight the complexity and practice of “lay epidemiology” in defining healthiness in eighteenth-century urbanizing spaces as departments of health were just being constructed.

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SCEMS | EMDG | Molly Nebiolo

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SCEMS | EMDG | Molly Nebiolo

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