Urban Casualties: Work-Related Injuries and Healing among Irish Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century New York City

Summary

Archaeologists have long recognized that urban environments are frequently hazardous to the health of residents. From the very first cities through the present, many urban populations have experienced higher rates of epidemic disease, endemic disease, and certain kinds of injuries than rural populations. Health is thus both a primary concern for public officials in cities and a daily struggle for ordinary urban-dwellers. This paper discusses the health-related challenges faced by rural Irish newcomers to the rapidly expanding city of New York in the mid to late nineteenth century. It focuses particularly on injuries resulting from the strenuous and dangerous jobs building and maintaining the city that Irish immigrants had little choice but to take. A combination of archaeological remains, hospital case records, and folklore records reveal how individuals treated these injuries, often creatively combining rural Irish traditions with new materials from the metropolis.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• In the City: archaeology and the personal experience of urban transition   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2013

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 449