At the turn of the twentieth century, the surgeon Dr. John H. Girdner started to notice something peculiar about his Manhattan patients. Girdner had left his home state of Tennessee to study at New York University and worked his way up the medical ranks, even attending to President James A. Garfield when he was shot. After twenty-five years of treating patients in the big city, Girdner decided to write his findings in a book. “A very large percentage [of people] lead an artificial life here,” he warned. “This manner of life has brought about a condition of mind, body, and soul, which I have endeavored to describe under the title of Newyorkitis.”
In what a Nashville American review described as a “merciless diagnosis,” Girdner’s 1901 book Newyorkitis dedicated over two hundred pages to breaking down the effects that living in Manhattan has on a person’s health. The suffix -itis generally denotes an inflammation, and Girdner explained how those who inhabit the city and are exposed to incessant noise, tall buildings blocking the horizon, and a culture obsessed with money could get “their New York inflamed.”
The media saw evidence of Girdner’s syndrome everywhere. In 1905 the New York Tribune published a report about the disease claiming that “there were three thousand cases of men falling dead or dying suddenly, an increase of five hundred over any previous year.” “The pace of the average New Yorker,” the article concluded, “is not only too fast, it is deadly.” The newspaper quoted Girdner at length to emphasize the severity of the epidemic that had struck the city:
A year later the New York Times ran a feature about a hotel in New Jersey where “physicians are sending patients [to] take a course of hydrotherapy baths as a cure for a nervous malady which they have diagnosed as ‘New Yorkitis.’ ” And as late as 1934 the New York Herald reported that the Hunter College health services department was being reorganized to fight “the chaos caused by a continuous combination of physical and mental shocks” seen in students as a result of Newyorkitis.