Contribution short abstract:

How has "sensitivity" affected conceptions of the environment and environmental changes? Melanie Kiechle will use examples from the nineteenth-century U.S., where individuals identified 'nuisances detrimental to health' through their senses, to argue for the importance of considering sensitivity.

Contribution long abstract:

Environmental historians have been engaging the senses more and more, but have yet to explore the category of sensitivity. Yet all sensory interactions with the environment are premised upon the physical and emotional sensitivity--real or proscribed--of the sensing body. In this presentation, Melanie Kiechle will use examples from the nineteenth-century United States, where individuals identified 'nuisances detrimental to health' through their senses, to argue for the importance of considering, defining, and analyzing sensitivity.

Before the United States' Civil War, sanitarians had agitated for public health reform through the argument that everyone with working senses could identify 'nuisances detrimental to health.' These nuisances included stagnant water, pestilential stenches, and other manifestations of environmental change. When health boards emerged after the Civil War, their members confronted tremendous numbers of complaints that were difficult to address, and these nascent boards began considering the "sensitiveness" of the complainant before investigating a complaint. This consideration of "sensitiveness" was not new, but premised upon existent beliefs that women's bodies were overly sensitive and that non-whites and laborers had "tolerant" bodies that were insensitive to many environmental stimuli. And yet the emerging field of psychology and diagnosis of neurasthenia promoted a discourse about sensitiveness that challenged both longstanding arguments for public health and the ability of complainants to have their concerns taken seriously. Ultimately, considerations of sensitivity became arguments for enduring rather than regulating the industrializing environment of American cities.