Embodied history: the lives of the poor in early Philadelphia

Abstract

Edited by Anya Jabour Embodied History: The Lives of Poor in Early Philadelphia. By Simon P. Newman. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Pp. x, 211. Illustrated. Cloth, $47.50; paper, $18.95.)Simon P. Newman's new book joins two relatively recent (and rapidly growing) areas of scholarship: studies of relief that have aimed at giving agency to poor; and studies that have examined effect of social and political relations on bodies of individuals. The book contributes meaningfully to both scholarly endeavors.Newman's aim for this study of in early national Philadelphia is straightforward: to demonstrate the embodiment of poverty, using records that social historians often have studied to show in graphic and often painful detail ways in which poverty and conditions of life and work marked and molded bodies of laboring poor (146). His argument that social historians seldom have been sensitive to original intent of records-to describe bodies of folk records' creators strove to control-is compellingly made with a combination of descriptive statistics and poignant anecdotes.The book is organized according to bodies being affected by early Philadelphia's attempts to define a new civic identity and establish a division between virtuous and vicious poverty. There are chapters on almshouse inmates, jailed vagrants, patients of Philadelphia Hospital for Sick Poor, runaway servants and slaves, and mariners. In each case, Newman utilizes records familiar to historians of early Philadelphia; he asks who these people were being affected by increasingly stringent rules for who counted as a city resident, who was entitled to assistance from civic authorities, and what constituted appropriate public behavior. He answers this question usefully in terms of descriptive statistics, but more important are stories he draws from records. Newman uses these case studies to address complex issue of how physical bodies of were shaped by their environment, their diet, their work, and-to a lesser extent-by their interactions with authority. The book would have been even stronger if Newman had explored further ways in which experiences and bodies of institutionalized were shaped by physical structures in which they lived or were imprisoned; but this is a quibble rather than a complaint.Embodied History continues work Newman began in his 1997 book, Parades and Politics of Street: Festive Culture in Early American Republic, by looking at lower classes of new republic. The chapter on mariners, for example, explores ways in which sailors' tattoos illustrated their politics, their religious beliefs, and their attachment to family and friends on land as well as to those at sea. The majority of lower sort in early Philadelphia left virtually no direct accounts of themselves, and this makes Newman's inferences from tattoos, administrative records, and other indirect sources invaluable. Equally important are sections where he moves to his primary aim-illuminating physical experience and appearance of poor. The chapter on Pennsylvania Hospital adds to work of Charles E. Rosenberg and John Alexander on administrative disagreements about which people were virtuous, and how many beds in hospital should be given to paying patients and which reserved for truly indigent, by providing a detailed discussion of maladies from which patients suffered. …