One of the Hull-House residents, under the
direction of a Chicago physician who stands high as an authority
on tuberculosis and who devotes a large proportion of his time to
our vicinity, made an investigation into housing conditions as
related to tuberculosis with a result as startling as that of the
"lung block" in New York.
It is these subtle evils of wretched and inadequate housing which
are often the most disastrous. In the summer of 1902 during an
epidemic of typhoid fever in which our ward, although containing
but one thirty-sixth of the population of the city, registered
one sixth of the total number of deaths, two of the Hull-House
residents made an investigation of the methods of plumbing in the
houses adjacent to conspicuous groups of fever cases. They
discovered among the people who had been exposed to the
infection, a widow who had lived in the ward for a number of
years, in a comfortable little house of her own. Although the
Italian immigrants were closing in all around her, she was not
willing to sell her property and to move away until she had
finished the education of her children. In the meantime she held
herself quite aloof from her Italian neighbors and could never be
drawn into any of the public efforts to secure a better code of
tenement-house sanitation.
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