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There is all kinds of evidence that the American public was extremely interested in hygiene and cleanliness. And they saw, you know, it's hard for us to quite put this together because we think of the early 20th century as a period where people began to distinguish between cleanliness and germs; all dirt is not necessarily the carrier of disease. But that's not a distinction that people are even comfortable with today when it comes to their own lives. In the early 20th century, people were less comfortable with it. So, interest in cleanliness and in hygiene overlapped. And there was a great deal of public interest in that, there was a great deal of concern for cleaning up streets, for evolving better sanitation departments. One of the most effective things that public health did in the early 20th century was purify water and protect the water supplies, particularly in urban areas where public water was available and primarily used. And in the late part of the 19th, the early 20th century, I would say that, retrospectively, we'd have to argue that the most important and effective thing that public health departments and public health as a field was able to do was to secure in densely populated areas a reasonably safe water supply and a reasonably effective removal of contaminants from the water supply, protection of the water supply. That's a huge accomplishment. ...In a period where the notion of cleanliness and the notion of social order and the problems that more densely populated urban areas created in terms of social order were all kind of associated with each other, you had some of the same kinds of reactions as we have today to immigrant populations, the feeling that there's more disease and more disorder in those populations who were living in slums, or those populations that didn't have proper food, and the feeling both of concern for them and fear of them. So there was a huge campaign in public health, partly through public health departments, for cleaning up tenements, for making housing better, for providing adequate hygienic facilities in housing, which was privately owned -- there's virtually no public housing at this period. And a lot of attention in public health went to those kind of programs. So there's overlapping between what is officially public health and what is sort of public concern with order, and social order as well as physical order. ...The other thing you want to think about is milk. The purification and protection of milk is one of the accomplishments of the early 20th century in public health. It comes to be partly through public health, but also through voluntary organizations concerned with mortality among children
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