This is the second of four blogs about Monmouth County's six Health Departments.
By 1860, Long Branch had been linked to New York by railroad and steamer and had become a popular resort of the rich and famous, according to Entertaining a Nation. The Career of Long Branch. Members of the Metropolitan Board of Health of New York City had even chosen Long Branch for the inaugural meeting of the American Public Health Association in the fall of 1872.
The Metropolitan Board of Health and the Long Branch Health Department
New York City became a national model for public health in 1866, when it established the Metropolitan Board of Health of New York City – just in time. The legislature passed the law creating the Board on February 26, 1866; cholera entered New York City three months later on May 2, 1866.
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In spite of having to build a department while they broke an epidemic, the Board became “the first effective municipal health department in a major city … New York was virtually alone in having an effective health board when the 1866-67 cholera epidemic swept through the country”, wrote Duffy in his book The Sanitarians.
Sanitary inspectors went to work on cholera with cleanup campaigns, fumigation and disinfection, and quarantine. Streets covered with horse manure were cleaned and paved. Owners of overflowing privies – outhouses were still more common then indoor plumbing - were ordered to maintain them. Sewage and drainage systems were developed. Pig sties and hog pens began to be eliminated. Ships were quarantined in ports and its passengers directed to quarantine hospitals or tent cities. Sanitarians targeted air pollution from soap factories and slaughter houses that were built in neighborhoods.
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The Board also worked closely with their Police Department. Four of the eight appointed members of the Metropolitan Board of Health of New York City were police commissioners. Every precinct maintained a log of public health complaints they had received and forwarded it to the office of the Sanitary Superintendent every day. The police even organized their own “sanitary detail” of officers.
The Board's aggressive sanitary measures showed other governing bodies that a health department could successfully block a cholera epidemic, even in a large, congested city. The lesson of this strong commitment between police and public health is literally written into the name of the first governing body of Long Branch.
In 1867, Long Branch separated from Ocean Township, and became a Borough governed by the Long Branch Police, Sanitary, and Improvement Commission. The Commissioners appointed Dr. I.O. Green as the Borough’s first Health Inspector when they formed the Long Branch Health Department in 1874 with a 3-member Board of Health, according to Entertaining a Nation. The Career of Long Branch. It was reorganized in 1913, when for the first time the Board appointed a licensed Health Officer to direct the Department.
The LBHD had a good run for about fifty years. But in 1928 the Board of Health was abolished and the Health Department became just another bureau in the Department of Public Safety. Then in 1936, the Health Officer from Long Branch formed a second health department, a regional health commission that is the second oldest existing health department in the County.
The Monmouth County Regional Health Commission No. 1
By the 1870’s in the United States, while most large cities had formed some kind of public health organization to deal with epidemics, there were few health departments in counties and small towns.
In New Jersey, Governor Marcus L. Ward, who had previously worked on the United States Sanitary Commission during the Civil War, appointed Dr. Ezra M. Hunt of Metuchen to chair the New Jersey Sanitary Commission in 1866 to study the need for sanitary reform.
This ultimately led to establishing a state board of health in 1878, followed by the mandate in 1880 for every municipality to form a local board of health. During the first year of this mandate in 1880, according to a website of the reports of boards of health from 1877 to 1969, twelve municipalities in Monmouth County formed Boards of Health: Asbury Park, Eatontown, Freehold Township, Howell, Manalapan, Manasquan, Matawan, Millstone, Ocean Grove, Shrewsbury Township, Red Bank, and Upper Freehold. Two hundred boards formed statewide.
This growth spurt inevitably led to efforts to improve public health services by focusing on consolidation and shared services. In 1906, the legislature authorized two or more adjacent municipalities to contract with a single health officer. In 1929, counties and towns were authorized into enter into joint public health contracts.
By 1937, a report by Princeton University concluded that public health was no longer functioning adequately at the municipal level and had recommended the creation of regional health districts. That conclusion had been reached a year earlier in Monmouth.
In 1936, the Long Branch Health Officer R. Clifford Errickson became the head of the newly formed Monmouth County Local Health Unit No. 2. When the legislature authorized the creation of Regional Health Commissions in 1938, the Commission reorganized as the Monmouth County Regional Health Commission No. 1.
Long Branch no longer had its own health department, but was now one of the member municipalities of the Commission. Each town’s local board of health retained jurisdiction in their own municipality, while the Commission’s Board of Health presided as the supervising board.
According to the departmental history, the first municipalities to join the Commission in 1936 and 1937 were Long Branch, Monmouth Beach, Ocean Township, Oceanport, West Long Branch and Sea Bright. At present 21 of the 52 municipalities in the County are members. The Middletown Township Health Department, which had been formed in 1948, contracted with the Commission in July of 2012.
Long Branch didn't just form the County's two oldest existing health departments. It is also where the first public health nursing organization was founded in Monmouth County in 1912. The Long Branch Public Health Nursing Association even became part of the Bureau of Health and Hospitals in Long Branch, that was under the supervision of R.E. Errickson as Health Officer in 1940, according to Entertaining a Nation. The Career of Long Branch.
Errickson served as the Commission's first Health Officer for only a few years, from 1936 to 1941, and died in the spring of 1942. He was replaced by J.F. Emmons, also from Long Branch, who served as Health Officer for almost thirty years until he retired 1971. In 1966, Long Branch broke from the Commission and re-established a borough Health Department with a full time Health Officer.
The four remaining health departments in the County today were formed in the 1970’s, when two different sets of legislation were once again pushing local health departments to consolidate.
RESOURCES
Alewitz, Sam. 1986. Ezra Mundy Hunt: A Life in Public Health. New Jersey Historical Commission, Department of State. Trenton, NJ.
Cowen, D. 1964. Medicine and Health in New Jersey: A History. D. Van Nostrand and Company, Inc. Princeton, NJ.
Duffy, J. 1990. The Sanitarians. A History of American Public Health. University of Illinois Press. Urbana and Chicago.
Fulcomer, Mark and Sass, Marcia. Accessed 8/3/13. Board of Health of the State of New Jersey. University Libraries Special Collections New Jersey Health Statistics from 1877 to 2000: An Historical Electronic Compendium of Published Reports. Compiled and Annotated by University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. http://libraries.umdnj.edu/History_of_Medicine/NJHS/statistics.html
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Monmouth County Regional Health Commission (MCRHC). July 2003. Representative/Alternate History By Town/Date. History – Officer Positions.
Monmouth County Regional Health Commission (MCRHC). Accessed 10/9/13. History of MCRHC #1. http://www.mcrhc.org/history.html
New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services. 4/2008. A study of New Jersey’s Local Public Health System. Div. of Health Infrastructure Preparedness and Emergency Response. http://www.state.nj.us/health/lh/documents/study_report.pdf
Pfizer Global Pharmaceuticals. 2006. Milestones in Public Health. Pfizer Inc., N.Y. http://www.pfizerpublichealth.com/publications.asp
Pizzi, R. Accessed 8/10/13. Apostles of cleanliness. Modern Drug Discovery. ACS Publications. http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/archive/mdd/v05/i05/html/05ttl.html
Pyle, G.F. 1969. The Diffusion of Cholera in the United States in the Nineteenth Century. Geographical Analysis. Volume 1, Issue 1, pages 59–75, January 1969. Volume 1, Issue 1, Article first published online: 3 SEP 2010 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1538-4632.1969.tb00605.x/pdf
Rosenberg, Charles.1962. The Cholera Years. University of Chicago Press.
Writers Project, Works Projects Administration, State of NJ.1940. Entertaining a Nation. The Career of Long Branch. Sponsored by the City of Long Branch. American Guide Series.
