Did the book talk about the use of the Thames as a giant flushing machine for the Tower of London? That I have also heard discussed and how disgusting that river was.
Kathy
It did not specifically talk about the Tower of London. The focus was on a specific district that was ravaged by a specific epidemic and the people who figured out the causality based upon the fact that most of the deaths clustered around a single pump. And surprisingly, despite that fact, most experts were still convinced that it was a case of bad air. Even to the extent that there was a case where water from the pump was sent to a person outside the city who then died... and people suggested that perhaps the bad air had some how affected the water.
Anyway, at the time in London there were numerous private water companies. Most of them took water from the Thames river. A couple, took their water from the lower Thames... which is AFTER various sewers dumped huge amounts of human waste into the river upstream. It is just amazing that there were not even MORE health problems given the abysmal level of sanitation.
And in all of the above, it is amazing to consider the every day sorts of risks that people lived with on a daily basis. If cholera took hold in a city, you could have 10,000 deaths in a few weeks. No one knew what was going on, or how to stop it. You might have your spouse catch the disease, and then after he/she dies, it would be your turn as the children watched.
Another startling thing is that cholera primarily kills by dehydration. You get very watery stools and quickly lose all you fluid. But people did not figure out the apparently obvious remedy to just give people lots of fluids... even bad water.
