1900’s
Twenty-first Annual Report of the State Board of Health of South Carolina for the Fiscal Year 1900 to the Legislature of South Carolina. The state company, state printers, Columbia, SC 1901
Issues included:
Smallpox - “several outbreaks ...for the past three years have been promptly suppressed by vaccination of those exposed and proper isolation of the sick... There was a budget request for $1500 for a state bacteriologist. T. Grange Simons, Chairman, Executive Committee, SC Board of Health. Dr. James Evans of Florence was Secretary.  The Board again requested that the legislature enact a law for registration of marriages, births and deaths...”These statistics constitute a sort of barometer of the various moribific influences weighing upon the people, and they will give to your honorable body important information in regard to the laws of population, the possibilities of extending human life, and the causes of disease and the causes of mortality...p. 1481
Statistics were reported by each local board, in more or less detail, most completely by Charleston.  Sanitation was the big issue this year: “In the City  of Charleston, we have an inadequate supply of pure and wholesome drinking water. A large number of persons in the city drink cistern water and some well water...22.9% were polluted of the cisterns...over 50% [of wells]...With an abundant supply of good and wholesome water...and a sewerage system...an era of good health would be inaugurated that would be of incalculable benefit...”
For the past twenty years we have, year after year, called to your attention the deplorable condition of the city as to the privy vaults and the storing of immense quantities of night soil, and the necessity for the foul and filthy removal of the same...There is but one and only one remedy, and it is to bring an abundant supply of water to the city.  Build a general system of sewerage and destroy these relics of an unscientific solution of a great municipal problem.  There were 2,006 privy vaults emptied in 1899.   These vaults not only pollute the air we breathe but poison the water we drink.  The Charleston Board had a budget of $21,600 in 1899.