“Under the Stimulus of Great Epidemics”: Reformers, Epidemics, and the Rise of State Level Public Health in Pennsylvania, 1872–1905

Though Pennsylvania was a prosperous industrial state and home to a great many medical institutions, it was among the last to constitute state-level public health organs. Pennsylvania’s first public health organization, the Board of Health, was founded in 1885 and was ineffectual. Its second public health organ, the Department of Health, founded in 1905, rapidly gained a reputation as the strongest state health department in the nation. Though the aims and powers of the two organizations were vastly different, they were linked by the central role that epidemics played in motivating the legislature to pass bills that founded the organizations. Chief among the outbreaks that compelled the legislature to act in the best interests of the commonwealth’s health were epidemics of typhoid in Plymouth in 1885 and Butler in 1903. This article explores the link between epidemic outbreaks during a twenty-year period and the state’s public health organizations.