Industrial cities throughout the second half of the 19th-century experienced rapid growth leading to the development of overcrowded and unhealthy living conditions for many residents. To combat these issues, the sanitary movement led by reformers, physicians, and administrators sought to educate urban residents about personal and domestic cleanliness, called for the construction of sewers to remove organic waste, and advocated for the preservation and creation of open space to purify noxious air. Notably, reformers like Frederick Law Olmsted viewed the creation of large and publicly accessible parks as a key urban planning technique to create disease-fighting spaces. According to Olmsted and his like-minded contemporaries, municipal parks not only purified the air of adjacent neighborhoods, but also provided residents with a physical escape from unhealthy urban environments. This paper seeks to illustrate how the sanitary movement and its concern for the health of urban populations influenced the design principles that Olmsted integrated into what is arguably known as his most notable urban project: Central Park in New York City. By analyzing historical documents ranging from public health reports, contemporaneous newspaper articles, planning documents, and the personal writings of Olmsted, this paper examines the relationship between 19th-century public health objectives and the specific design elements of urban parks. It does so by tracing the ways in which Olmsted parsed the sanitary movement's ambiguous call for open space in cramped cities into actionable goals, which include (1) leisure and recreation, (2) safety, and (3) psychology. This paper also goes on to investigate how urban residents reacted to the alleged health benefits attributed to city parks. As a result, this paper highlights how key aspects of the sanitary movement inspired design choices that can be observed in the park today, and observed in other urban parks later on in the future.