Dr. Elisha Harris was born (March 5, 1824) and educated in Westminster, spending his early life on his father’s farm here. (This information comes from the N.Y. Times obituary below and nothing is known of him locally. The 1941 town history does not mention the family name Harris.) When he died in 1884, he was fondly remembered in the New York Times as a pioneer in public health, sanitation, vaccination, and prison reformation. “He was one of God’s noblemen.” He designed New York’s first floating hospital (used for yellow fever epidemics) and later received a medal for inventing the railway ambulance.
New York Times
Feb. 1, 1884
THE DEATH OF DR. HARRIS
LIFE-WORK OF A PHILANTHROPIC PHYSICIAN.
HIS VALUABLE SERVICES TO THE CAUSE OF SANITARY REFORM—WHAT HE DID DURING THE REBELLION.
Dr. Elisha Harris, Secretary of the State Board of Health, died yesterday morning a the Delavan House in Albany, after an illness of but four days’ duration. The cause of death was an attack of peritonitis. Dr. Harris, who was well known throughout the entire civilized world by reason of his connection with sanitary work and the collation of vital statistics, was born in Westminster, Vt., March 5, 1824. After a common school education in his native town, in 1837 he became an academical student of Dr. S. B. Woolworth, late Secretary of the State Board of Regents of the University of the State of New-York. During 10 years of his life spent as teacher, student, and farm assistant to his father, he pursued his medical studies, and finally was graduated from the college of Physicians and Surgeons in 1849. Lafayette College subsequently conferred upon him the honorary title of Master of Arts. Soon after beginning the practice of medicine, he married, in the Autumn of 1849, the only daughter of the Rev. Dr. Josiah B. Andrews. She died in 1867, leaving no children, and from the date of her death Dr. Harris gave all his time to the public service in various capacities.
Dr. Harris’s first entrance into the public service was in 1855, when he was made Superintendent and Physician-in-Chief of the Quarantine Hospitals at Staten island. To him was intrusted, in 1859, the construction of a floating hospital to be anchored below the narrows facing the open seas. His mastery of the sanitary problems connected with the New-York Quarantine station resulted in the establishment of the present system of quarantine defenses, in all their important details. When the war of the rebellion broke out, Dr. Harris, in connection with the Rev. Dr. Henry C. Bellows and others, became interested in the national Sanitary Commission, and he was for nearly five years a Sanitary Commissioner. The railway ambulance was exclusively his device, and proved of such value that, in 1867, at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, he was awarded a bronze medal. A silver medal was given him for the same ambulance by the Société des Secours aux Blessés. The ambulance was also adopted by the Prussian Army in the Franco-Prussian war. The system of a national record of the deaths and burials of soldiers was also devised by him and adopted by the War Department. At the close of the war he was intrusted with the collection of the sanitary history of the war, which was published in several volumes, entitled “Sanitary Memoirs of the War.”
At the close of the war Dr. Harris again turned his attention to the sanitary conditions and needs of this city. As a voluntary work, he supervised a sanitary survey of the city. The results of this were published by the Appletons, as a report on the sanitary condition and wants of the city. It was a work of great value to sanitary science, as well as to the Metropolis itself. He entered the service of the Metropolitan Board of Health three days after its organization, March 5, 1866, the same day on which the Secretary of the present board, Col. Emmons Clark, received his original appointment. His associates on the board were Drs. James Crane, Willard Parker, John O. Stone, and John Swinburne, and Jackson S. Schultz. The ex officio members were Thomas C. Acton, John G. Bergen, Joseph S. Bosworth, and Benjamin F. Manierre. Dr. Harris then held the position of Registrar of Records. In 1869, when E. B. Dalton, the first Sanitary Superintendent of the city, resigned, Dr. Harris was appointed as his successor, but was legislated out of office in 1870, with the adoption of the new charter. In 1873 he was appointed Registrar of Vital Statistics, and he retained that position until January, 1876, when he was again virtually legislated out of office, the Board of Estimate and Apportionment having consolidated the Bureau of vital Statistics and the Sanitary bureau and extinguished the office of Registrar of Records, whose work is now performed by the Sanitary Superintendent and his assistants. When Dr. Harris was first appointed to the office of Registrar, in 1866, to succeed F. I. A. Boole, the records were in a very bad condition and wholly unreliable. Order was created out of chaos, and the system now in use was devised by him.
One of the greatest works for the benefit of the people of the city in which Dr. Harris was engaged was the first thorough tenement-house survey, known as the Sanitary Survey of 1869. It was so complete that the blanks filled in by the Inspectors were bound, and they are to-day preserved and esteemed as one of the most precious series of records in the possession of the department. The immediate result of this work was to render tenement-house life less hideous, by making ventilation of dark bedrooms compulsory. By Dr. Harris’s suggestion or direction over 50,000 windows for ventilating purposes were put in such rooms. Dr. Harris was also actively engaged in fighting the epidemic relapsing fever in 1870, when, there being no hospitals for contagious diseases, a thorough system of disinfecting and fumigation was made necessary. To him also is due much credit for taking the first step in establishing the system of public vaccination. This was in 1869, and about 50 physicians in that year vaccinated between 50,000 and 60,000 persons. He also did efficient work during the cholera epidemic of 1866-7, though he modestly allowed the executive honors of that fight to rest with Dr. Dalton, whose most efficient aid he as at the time. Dr. Harris’s uniform politeness, courtesy, and urbanity while connected with the Health Department won for him the title of “the Chesterfield of the department.”
When in 1880, the Legislature organized the State Board of Health, Dr. Harris was made one of the three Commissioners, and he was unanimously elected Secretary and State Superintendent of Vital Statistics. These positions he held at the time of his death. The organization of the entire service was due in great part to his ability as an executive officer. He was also instrumental in the organization of the American Public Health Association, of which he was for several years both Secretary and President. Into the work of this association he entered with his whole soul, devoting all the time he could spare to the advancement of its aims and interests.
Dr. Harris was also widely known as a philanthropist. He was for many years indentified with the Prison Association, for the care and reformation of discharged convicts. He was its corresponding Secretary from 1872 to 1880 and a member of the Executive Committee at the time of his death. He was made State Agent for Discharged Convicts when that office was created, in 1880. He served for a year and a half in organizing the system of State philanthropic work done by that officer. The Prison Association was in session at Charlton T. Lewis’s office yesterday afternoon when the news of Dr. Harris’s death was received, and it adopted resolutions recognizing the loss to the organization and paying tribute to his worth and work. Another tribute to Dr. Harris’s wok was yesterday paid by Michael Dunn, Superintendent of the House of Industry at Houston and Mulberry streets, who on hearing of his death said sorrowfully, “I’m sorry he’s gone; he was one of God’s noblemen. It was his words with me that first led me to abandon a criminal life and try to live honestly.”
Dr. Harris was also identified with the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, and a member of the County Medical Society, the New-York Academy of Medicine, the Physicians’ Mutual Aid Association, the Society for the Relief of Orphans and Widows of Medical Men, the Medical Journal Association, and the Public Health Association of New-York. He was also an active of honorary member of various other associations and societies in his country and Europe. He was consulting physician to the country branch of the Nursery and Child’s Hospital. He was a voluminous writer of works on sanitary and philanthropic subjects, and also on questions relating to vital statistics.
