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Episode 1: The Healthiest City
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In the years after its effective response to the 1918 “Spanish flu” pandemic, Milwaukee became known as “the healthiest city.” But that reputation, and the public health preparedness that made it possible, wasn’t built up overnight: Milwaukee learned how to respond to a dangerous epidemic the hard way. In episode one of The Healthiest City podcast, Maddy Tabor and Olivia Hoff explore how Milwaukee’s public health policies were affected by the smallpox outbreak of 1894.
German and Polish immigrants on Milwaukee’s South Side feared government control and saw the city’s isolation of children as a threat. Walter Kempster, the city’s public health commissioner, failed to soothe their concerns. Instead of communicating with these communities on their own terms and in their own languages, Kempster reacted to their resistance with force, provoking widespread outrage that only made matters worse. Judy Leavitt, a historian of medicine and the author of The Healthiest City, joins our hosts to discuss how Milwaukee learned lasting lessons from this devastating failure.
For more information, including photographs and documents from the era, visit https://milwaukeehistory.net/podcast/.
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