Cholera’s Frontiers

Sewage as we know it—the everyday miracle of feces disappearing down the toilet, pushed by a never-ending flow of clean water—is a recent invention. The flush toilet itself has been created, and then forgotten, many times down through the ages. But the grand scheme that we all take for granted—an endless supply of clean water piped in and limitless amounts of dirty water piped out—was thought up by Edwin Chadwick, a British lawyer turned public health crusader, in the 1840s. Back then the cities of the Old World were awash in human waste. Even the most elegant homes had privies that emptied into cesspits, where decades of accumulated filth sat rotting beneath the parlor floor. The poor lived in tenements where dozens of people might have to share one privy. Chadwick supervised a survey of sanitary conditions in English cities that came up with some amazing statistics. In parts of Manchester there was one privy to every 215 people. Some houses had yards covered six inches deep in “human ordure,” which the inhabitants crossed by stepping on bricks. “Sir Henry De La Beche was obliged at Bristol to stand up at the end of alleys and vomit while Dr. Playfair was investigating overflowing privies,” Chadwick wrote of one of his colleagues. “Sir Henry was obliged to give it up.” London had sewers, of a sort: They were open ditches that sloped toward the Thames, and were meant to drain stormwater out of the streets. But by Chadwick’s day, the gunk from thousands of overflowing cesspits emptied into these sewers, then oozed its way into the river. Parliament’s windows on the riverfront had not been opened in years because of the stench. The Chelsea Water Company, which provided drinking water to many Londoners, still had its intake a few feet from the outfall of the Ranelagh sewer. An editorial in The Spectator pointed out that city residents paid the water companies “340,000 pounds per annum for a more or less concentrated solution of native guano.”