It is hard to maintain sanitation standards in crowded conditions. On the one hand, it must be decided whether maintaining cleanliness is the authorities’ or the inhabitants’ responsibility, on the other hand, the minimum standards must be specified. Throughout history, cities were never exactly known for their cleanliness, quite the contrary: even well into the nineteenth century, people in bigger cities faced nightmare conditions.The study examines municipal sanitation conditions in a mid-size town in Hungary in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. This period is relevant here for two reasons: on the one hand, this was a time of progress in medicine, as the miasma theory was superseded by the new understanding of bacterial approach. After this paradigm shift, public health was no longer fighting visible dangers and this discovery changed common perceptions of cleanliness and health. The scientific breakthrough brought about significant changes in municipal governance as well, primarily in water use and sanitary regulations enforced in urbans spaces.On the other hand, the period is significant also because a major flood in August 1878 revealed the poor public sanitation and health conditions plaguing Miskolc. Partly for reasons of flood protection, but even more so on account of the much needed protection of public health, the leadership of the town pledged to push for a complete overhaul of the drinking water and sewage system. The study describes the prevailing public health conditions in the town and explores how both the new discoveries in pathology and the natural disaster’s role in unmasking the terrible sanitary conditions transformed the locals’ perceptions about cleanliness. It also addresses the measures that fostered this change as well as the challenges that they faced.

Natural disasters have always been in the crosshairs of attention, and with the increasing access to press they have become so-called media-born events. From the birth of photography onwards, people endeavoured to capture the impact of natural disasters. The present study examines the earliest examples of disaster photography from Hungary, images of major floods in the 1870s. The photos of two Budapest floods (1875, 1876), as well as of those which devastated Miskolc (1878) and Szeged (1879), allow a comparison of the images created by the new technology with graphic depictions of previous eras. In order to draw a general picture of the perception of floods, the study also focuses on the representation of nature, city and people in photography.The photographs examined retain the previous era’s Classicist or Romantic approach to content and stylistic character, while offering unique and novel ways of disaster representation using the language of photography. On one hand, due to technological limitations, the flood narrative created by photography lacks the traditional dramatic style of earlier graphic representations using depictions of motion and emotions. As opposed to these, photographs communicate the silent drama of floods: similarly to post-battle images, the tragedy is encapsulated in the tension between the subject (the destruction) and the extreme serenity of its depiction. On the other hand, due to the – unintentional – departure from the previous dramatic narrative, floods depicted in photographs lose the primary reason that made them a disaster: the extraordinary. Floods are no longer catastropic – stripped of their extraordinariness, they become everyday phenomena, mere misfortune.

Nincs absztrakt.

The sudden flooding that hit Miskolc at night time on 30 August 1878 changed the lives of thousands of people in a few hours. Despite the fact that out of all the natural disasters of the nineteenth century this flood claimed the most lives, neither the Miskolc disaster nor the one that took place seven months later at Szeged have received much scholarly attention, even at the level of general interest. On the contrary, contemporary media was acutely aware of the tragedy, recording events and the experiences of people, who had witnessed the terror of the summer disaster. The study attempts to make the voices of flood survivors heard, by reconstructing who they were, their lives before the flood, their experience on the fateful night and how it affected their lives afterwards if they managed to survive. Fifteen stories of widows, elderly men, bachelors, children and family men have been reconstructed from narrative and statistical sources to shed light on the perceptions and experiences of the survivors. As the number of narratives is insufficient for overarching conclusions about ‘crisis management strategies’, the aim of the study is simply to present the reconstructed life stories of survivors. In conclusion, however, the narratives do show that the chances to rebuild lives after the flood largely depended on the flexibility of the bread-winner’s occupation and its adaptability to new conditions.

Nincs absztrakt.