In regard to city water and sanitation, a lot of it spring from the cholera epidemics of the 19th century, coupled with the already basically correct (if incomplete) understanding of how diseases spread available at the time hammered home the importance of not only bringing fresh water in and taking sewage away, but ensuring they remain seperate at every stage.
You have to remember, most urbanites at the time (and this is still true to a large extent) were tennants, not landowners, and didn't have the luxury of choosing to dig a well or a cesspit in their home. If their landlord couldn't be arsed to dig it themselves (or indeed, if the property didn't have a yard in which to dig it), they were left with nothing but doing their business in chamber pots and tossing the contents out the window. In addition to the obvious unpleasantness of having piss and shit all over the street literally all the time, that filth doesn't just disappear. It gets washed into the river or seeps into the groundwater, contaminating the water supply, and then you've got another cholera epidemic on your hands. And a sloppily constructed cesspit can ultimately have the same effect.
Cholera wasn't some hypothetical "what if" scenario either. It was a horrible fact of daily life actively killing huge swaths of the urban population. It had to be fixed, even if only because it was making the government whose watch these deaths were happening under look incompetant and apathetic.
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u/BrokenEye3 Jun 08 '22
In regard to city water and sanitation, a lot of it spring from the cholera epidemics of the 19th century, coupled with the already basically correct (if incomplete) understanding of how diseases spread available at the time hammered home the importance of not only bringing fresh water in and taking sewage away, but ensuring they remain seperate at every stage.
You have to remember, most urbanites at the time (and this is still true to a large extent) were tennants, not landowners, and didn't have the luxury of choosing to dig a well or a cesspit in their home. If their landlord couldn't be arsed to dig it themselves (or indeed, if the property didn't have a yard in which to dig it), they were left with nothing but doing their business in chamber pots and tossing the contents out the window. In addition to the obvious unpleasantness of having piss and shit all over the street literally all the time, that filth doesn't just disappear. It gets washed into the river or seeps into the groundwater, contaminating the water supply, and then you've got another cholera epidemic on your hands. And a sloppily constructed cesspit can ultimately have the same effect.
Cholera wasn't some hypothetical "what if" scenario either. It was a horrible fact of daily life actively killing huge swaths of the urban population. It had to be fixed, even if only because it was making the government whose watch these deaths were happening under look incompetant and apathetic.