This 1940's photo shows the Workmen’s Circle giving out smallpox vaccines in the large hall in the historic Forward building. The Workmen’s Circle -- now called the Workers Circle, or Der Arbeter Ring in Yiddish, is a Jewish progressive social justice organization that is also historically a socialist, Jewish mutual benefit society that provided services including education, burial benefits and medical care to its members.

The mass vaccination event seen here was organized by the group’s medical department, founded in 1919 on the Lower East Side and housed for decades in the historic Forward building on East Broadway. The medical department was dedicated to providing healthcare to members who opted to pay into the plan for free or at a very low cost compared to private practices. Historically, The Forward worked with the Workmen’s Circle on issues of public health to help distribute vaccines and convey information to their Yiddish readers and the general working-class public.

The department ran a clinic at 401 Broadway, seen here when it was still the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad ticket office. During the Great Depression, the clinic had 43 general doctors and 23 specialists. The clinic offered treatment for nose, throat, ear, eye and skin ailments, men's and women's diseases, nervous disorders, and hay fever. According to a Depression-era issue of The Jewish Social Service Quarterly, the clinic was also where “electric treatment is given for paralysis, rheumatism, and other ailments.” Patients also went to the clinic for general physical examinations. Physicians were mostly paid for their services, but during the Great Depression, many volunteered to treat the unemployed free of charge. The pioneering Workmen’s Circle medical department was devised by Samuel Koner, an attorney who also ran the department he founded. Born in Russia to Jewish parents, Koner came to the United States as a teenager in 1905. His daughter was the world famous dancer and choreographer Pauline Koner. Koner was known as “a dynamic performer, a daring choreographer, and an influential teacher.” She was married to conductor Fritz Mahler, who was also a cousin of renowned composer Gustav Mahler.

The Forward published a photograph featuring New York City Mayor William O'Dwyer, seen here in 1950, receiving his smallpox vaccination from New York City Health Commissioner Dr. Israel Weinstein on its front page below the fold on April 14, 1947. The article gave a historic overview of how the disease was experienced in the old country, gave an international overview of the illness including practices in Turkey and China, and listed who must get the vaccination and how that was currently available in the city.ַ

New York City’s tackling outbreaks of infectious disease dates back long before 1947. North Brother Island, seen above in 1904, was the location of the Riverside Hospital from 1881 until 1943. The hospital was built to contain people who suffered from quarantinable diseases, namely smallpox, yellow fever, and tuberculosis. Riverside Hospital, seen here in 1937, was founded in the 1850s as a smallpox hospital. Mary Mallon, infamously called “Typhoid Mary” was forcibly detained here twice after she refused to quarantine despite being an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid, and continuing to work as a cook and infecting others. Mallon died at Riverside Hospital in 1939 after a total of nearly three decades in isolation.

Created from a landfill in the 1870s, Hoffman Island, seen here, was a quarantine station for immigrants with contagious diseases. Patients, including children, were stationed here to be observed by doctors and were subject routinely watched by police officers to prevent escape.

Sea View Hospital, seen here, was a municipal facility for treating tuberculosis patients and keeping them isolated from the general population on Hoffman Island. Sea View was home to a group of African American nurses known as the “Black Angels.” Because tuberculosis was highly infectious, many privileged white nurses, who had their choice of other assignments refused to work at Seaview. City officials recruited African-American nurses from around the country.

Jewish immigrants, having passed the health inspection upon landing here in the city and most having travelled in crowded steerage on ships, soon faced dingy long hours in garment and other factories and crowded unsanitary living conditions. The spread of tuberculosis and other infectious diseases was clearly of great concern both in the city and in borderland sites like Ellis Island, seen here. Progressive organizations like the Worker’s Circle understood that public health was the first step to growing an informed, well cared for citizenry. The Forward carried that message too. In a poem she wrote, Pauline Koner, daughter of Forward readers who helped organize around the critical issues of public health, seemed to intuitively understand what the abyss of a dire lack of affordable health care meant for the American working masses and how, with social activism, and a healthy vibrant press, it could change. Standing at the edge of Nowhere I look into the Somewhere And wonder. Standing at the edge of Somewhere I look into the Nowhere And wonder.