Creeks, Streets, and Marshland: How Miasma and City Infrastructure Created Sites of (Un)Healthiness in Colonial Charleston

This paper covers some of the earliest histories of Charleston's construction and how this physical landscape shaped ideas of public health. This conference paper discusses how the formation and upkeep of Charleston's streets and its geography near waterways, creeks, and marshes provided inhabitants with a unique experience of defining healthy and unhealthy spaces in a town that was known for unhealthiness and endemic diseases. I discuss the role disgust played in the unique history of defining ill-health when living near water in an early colonial city, with particular focus on how people tried to control and maintain waterways in Charleston compared to in Philadelphia, where creeks were paved over once they became polluted in the eighteenth century.