"Could a situation be more ghastly?": Doctors, Disinfectants, and the Dead After the Johnstown Flood of 1889

Tuesday, January 23, 2024, 6-7:15pm Eastern

~ University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health Lecture ~

Vicki Daniel, PhD (Case Western)

On May 31, 1889, the South Fork Dam located in Western Pennsylvania’s Conemaugh Valley failed catastrophically, sending a torrent of water toward the city of Johnstown and killing approximately 2,200 people. In the wake of the flood, officials from the Pennsylvania Board of Health immediately labeled the decomposing human bodies scattered throughout the valley as a massive health threat and established new protocols for protecting the public’s health. At the same time, survivors grieved the dead as beloved friends and neighbors who deserved proper burial and commemoration. For this reason, the Johnstown Flood represents a moment of conflict between the social and medical conceptualizations of the dead in the era of emerging public health paradigms. In this talk, I will examine the roots of this conflict and analyze how local leaders and state health officials in Johnstown tried to balance between the biological and social imperatives of mass fatality events. I will show how officials deployed public health measures that reflected a compromise between viewing the dead as dangerous material and seeing them as human remains.

Click here to watch the recording of the lecture. A brief business meeting took place before the lecture with reports from the Secretary and Treasurer as well as an election; see the Contact Us page for the current officers.

Image: Anonymous depiction of the flood water surging over the stone railway bridge, which is in the center. Behind it is a pile of burning buildings and trees with orange-yellow flames and gray smoke. There are people rushing about and bodies in the water and on the ground.