Plumbing & Sanitation in the Good Old Days
(From an article in WPCA News by Kenneth Mirvis)

Saint Francis of Assisi, one of history's true lovers of life, taught that dirtiness was a sign of holiness. Saint Jerome was ashamed of his followers because they were too clean. Saint Catherine of Siena publicly gave up washing for good, and Saint Agnes reputedly died without ever having washed. They could have kept themselves clean; they just did not want to.

Knowledge of sanitation, in fact, has been with us for centuries. More than 4,000 years ago, residents of Crete built a palace that included a fresh water supply, a complete sewage system, and even a wooden-seated flushing toilets. Nevertheless, almost 3,800 years passed before the toilet came into widespread use.

Despite painfully slow advances in sanitary practices (and sometimes their disappearance altogether), plumbing has been with us throughout written history. In imperial Rome, for example, elegant communal baths accommodated as many as 3,000 people, however, bathing was not necessarily for getting clean. The baths were social gathering places, suitable for conversation, relaxation, and who knows what else. In Rome, the sexes remained segregated.

During the Middle Ages, Europe's darkest years, plagues swept across the continent, wiping out 25 million people - a quarter of the population. Sanitation simply did not exist. Among the few great achievements of the Middle Ages were the remarkable castles built throughout Europe. They were small fortresses, cities under a single roof. Some, not so small, contained as many as 1,500 rooms. Their defense, as we all learned in grade-school history class, relied in part on the moats that surrounded them. But alas, that explanation is not entirely true. In fact, the moats did provide effective protection from invading enemies, but not by design. The castles contained no bathrooms. They did however have privies built into the outside walls that were dumped directly into moats. The moats were nothing more than stagnant cesspools that must have been incomprehensibly disgusting. Only a fool would have crossed one.

Medieval moats highlight the difficulties accompanying waste disposal. In 17th -century England, the problem reached staggering proportions. In 1609 London built a water system that brought clean water from a distance of 40 miles. With plenty of available water, the use of the water closet flourished. Then came the Industrial Revolution. Millions of people moved from rural areas to the city for work. In 1778 Joseph Brahma (and not, as legend would have it, John Crapper) received a patent for the float-and-valve flushing system still in use today. While water closets became more common, they were connected to cesspools by unventilated pipes. Not only did these WCs stink to high heaven, but they were also serious sources of bacteria and infection. In the true spirit of treating the symptom instead of the disease, the Stink Trap was patented in 1782. It successfully eliminated the smell but did nothing to stop the spread of disease.

Society simply did not know how to deal with the problems created by industrialization. In 1847 the British Parliament created a sewer commission and required that every house have some sort of sanitation: an ash pit, a privy, or a water closet. In 1848 they passed the National Public Health Act, a model plumbing code that much of the world has followed. But changes were slow in coming between 1849 and 1854, 20,000 Londoners died of cholera water borne disease). The Thames - the source of most of London's drinking water- was also its sewer! The city had a population of three million and no waste treatment. All of the city's human and industrial waste flowed into the Thames River.

In 1859 Parliament actually had to be suspended for a short time because of the unbearable stench. In 1861 Prince Albert died from typhoid (another water borne disease). In 1871 the Prince of Wales almost died from the same disease. Moved by his illness, his recovery, and the related sanitary conditions, he reportedly said that were he not a prince, he'd like to be a plumber.

From that point on, sanitation became a public concern, but it was hard to change old habits and fears. For example, a 19th-century administrator at Oxford College, a Dr. Routh, saw no reason to install showers or baths in the dormitories because "undergraduates were only in residence for eight weeks at a stretch".

Later that century, Mrs. Isabella Beeton - a "helpful hints" journalist of the day - wrote, "Baths are invaluable aids in promoting and preserving health, if properly used in suitable cases; but may become dangerous agents, causing even fatal results, if employed by the wrong individuals, at improper times, or with excessive frequency.

Copyright © 1994, 1995 Compton's New Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Duncan Edwards-FPG