Flies, manure, and window screens: medical entomology and environmental reform in early-twentieth-century US cities Dawn Day Biehler University of Maryland-Baltimore County, Department of Geography and Environmental Systems,1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250, USA Abstract This paper traces responses to house flies in US cities as health departments attempted to control pollution and disease in the early twentieth century. It speaks to other historical geographies about the state, citizens, and the urban environment by showing how medical entomology prescribed contra- dictory changes to civic and domestic space, and how urban people and nature resisted these changes. With the advent of medical entomology, health reformers came to see house flies as agents that wove the entire city together as an interconnected ecology, carrying diseases from neighborhood to neighborhood and across the threshold of the home. But different reformers argued for quite distinct exercises of power in the urban landscape and ecological processes. Some physicians and entomologists argued that the state must modernize networks of fly-breeding organic matter, most notably horse manure and human waste. Such interventions were intended to be preventive and holistic, and aimed to protect all city dwellers. Other reformers, however, doubted the capacity of the state to tame material flows of waste, and instead sought changes to domestic space that would require house- holders – especially women – to shore up the boundaries of the house against flies. When city governments adopted these distinct interventions they encountered quite distinct sorts of resistance because of the house fly’s tight links with urban nature and domestic practices. Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Insects; Entomology; Public health; Infectious disease; Domestic space; Urban environment Introduction When typhoid hit Chicago in 1902 with the city’s biggest outbreak in ten years, most commentators blamed weather and filthy water. According to authorities, heavy summer rains had washed infected human waste out into Lake Michigan, endangering the entire citi- zenry. The Board of Health promised new protections for the city’s water supply – a seemingly progressive measure for this famously corrupt town. 1 Yet Alice Hamilton, physician and resident of Hull House, argued that the scrutiny and action focused on the overall water supply masked an ongoing injustice at a smaller scale. Only medical entomology, she said, could explain ‘the peculiar localization of the epidemic’ in poor, immigrant neighborhoods like the nineteenth ward. 2 Hamilton was attracted to this new etiological theory for its scientific cachet – and because it served Hull House’s aim to bring health services to Chicago’s poorest communities. In the wards where typhoid cases were concentrated, landlords bribed health inspectors to ignore defective privies. Without a public check on these private properties, house flies thrived in human waste. Hamilton concluded that flies carried germs from that waste to the homes of unsuspecting neighbors. 3 Polluted water could certainly threaten the entire city. But upgrading safeguards for drinking water would do little to help renters whose fates were left to the random flights of germ-ridden insects. Hull House’s revelations of unequal health protection shocked the city and helped spread worry to a nation swarming with flies. 4 In the first two decades of the twentieth century, scientists and reformers called on emerging ideas about house flies to urge new interventions in the urban environment. This paper examines how E-mail addresses: dbiehler@umbc.edu, dawn.biehler@gmail.com 1 Not a hot day in the summer, Chicago Daily Tribune (31 August 1902) B1; Water worse than ever, Chicago Daily Tribune (20 December 1902) 16; A. Hamilton, M. Gernon and G. Howe, An Inquiry into the Causes of the Recent Epidemic of Typhoid Fever in Chicago, Chicago, 1903, 4. 2 Hamilton, Gernon and Howe, An Inquiry (note 1), 5. 3 Asks Hull House to bring proof, Chicago Daily Tribune (15 April 1903) 16; A. Hamilton, The common house fly as a carrier of typhoid, Journal of the American Medical Association 42 (1904) 1034; A. Hamilton, The fly as a carrier of typhoid, Journal of the American Medical Association 40 (1903) 576–583; H. Platt, Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago, Chicago, 2005, 333–361. 4 Asks Hull House to bring proof, Chicago Daily Tribune (note 3); Hamilton, The common house fly as a carrier of typhoid (note 3). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Historical Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jhg 0305-7488/$ – see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2009.03.003 Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 68–78