Drinking Water (12 page)

Source Protection

Once one has identified a reliable and safe source for drinking water, it is essential to protect the source from harms, both seen and unseen. Most obviously, and particularly in arid regions, one must protect against physical appropriation. Where water is scarce, clear property regimes emerge with effective sanctions. As described previously, despite the widespread norm of a Right of Thirst, outsiders still need to ask permission to drink from a well in southern Zimbabwe or a spring in central Australia.

The most common approach for source protection has been through rules restricting activities that may cause pollution. Biblical text from Deuteronomy, for example, requires that waste be disposed of far away from areas of human habitation. The Babylonian Talmud similarly forbade throwing waste into wells. Nor could tanneries,
slaughterhouses, cemeteries, or furnaces operate within twenty-five meters of a well. Some of the earliest environmental laws and policies in England concerned source protection. Building owners were required to keep their street frontages clean. People were paid to collect “night soil” and other waste from streets and cesspits. Dung was collected, transported in boats to the middle of the Thames, and dumped where the current ran strongest.

Half a world away, Australian aboriginal groups have had clear source protection rules as well. Defecating and starting a fire near a waterhole were vitally serious offenses, giving those responsible for the water the right to punish these transgressions by death. Among the Yoruba in Africa, the head of the community establishes rules for source protection. Bathing and clothes washing are prohibited near drinking water sources, nor are small children or anyone with a disease permitted to walk in nearby streams. Those caught washing clothes near a drinking water source are reported to the King and punished.

In addition to regulating behavior, societies have long relied on engineering to protect sources. The Book of Genesis describes how the shepherdess Rachel kept her well covered with a rock to keep the water clean. As with all things hydrological, though, for impressive technology, one inevitably looks to Rome. The Romans made the critical realization that water for flushing wastes out of the city was just as important as the clean water piped into the city. While the aqueducts are justly renowned, equally impressive was the Cloaca Maxima, Rome’s sewer system. Constructed in the sixth century BC, the connected pipes and ditches drained the filth of the city’s public toilets, bathhouses, buildings, and streets into the Tiber, which carried it safely away downstream.

With the fall of the Roman Empire, however, the engineering approach to source protection in Europe largely fell away. Almost no major works were built to address sanitation until well into the nineteenth century, in part perhaps because there was no money to be made, and in part because the connection had not yet been made between sanitation and source protection. For the most part, filth flowed out windows, down the streets, and into the same
streams, rivers, and lakes where the city’s inhabitants drew their water. As a result, cities stank to high heaven.

This state of affairs only became worse as cities grew in population through the Middle Ages. As late as 1854, journalist George Goodwin graphically described London as a “cesspool city. The entire excrementation of the Metropolis shall sooner or later be mingled in the stream of the river, there to be rolled backward and forward around the population.” The Thames grew so polluted in an 1858 episode, dubbed “The Great Stink” by the
Times
, that the overpowering stench forced Parliament to adjourn until the odors subsided. In a desperate attempt to make the Houses of Parliament bearable, curtains in the chambers were soaked in chloride of lime. Indeed, one historian has claimed that “the Dark Ages for water were the nineteenth century, when increasing industrialization, urbanization, inadequate hygiene, and inadequate knowledge made drinking water dangerous.”

By the end of the nineteenth century, however, London’s drinking water and sanitation had improved dramatically, and this was the case in many other European and North American cities. The cause for this sea change was twofold: the development of the germ theory of disease and the “Great Sanitation Awakening.” These came together in the classic story of John Snow and the famed Broad Street Pump.

Beginning on August 30, 1854, an outbreak of cholera in the Soho area of London resulted in more than five hundred deaths in just ten days. There was nothing particularly notable about this. Cholera and typhoid outbreaks in urban areas were common throughout the nineteenth century. Long known as “the poor man’s plague” because of its prevalence in poor, crowded urban areas, cholera killed remarkably quickly. A victim could feel healthy in the morning and be dead by that evening, felled by painful cramps, vomiting and diarrhea. The disease seemed to be gaining ground, and not just in poor quarters. A cholera outbreak in New York City had killed 3,500 people in 1832, and typhoid had killed more than 50,000 Britons a year earlier. But since common wisdom held that these diseases spread in miasmic air, most precautions taken by the authorities did little to solve the underlying problem. John Snow, though, suspected that miasma was missing the mark. A self-made man, Snow had become an influential London physician, personally chosen to administer chloroform to Queen Victoria during the birth of her son Prince Leopold—the first royal to give birth under anesthesia.

John Snow, 1813–1858

Snow was a fanatic about clean water. Soon after moving to London, he had already constructed a distillation apparatus in his lodgings so that he could boil and purify his water before drinking it. He had been fascinated by cholera epidemics for much of his career, and the miasmatic explanation struck him as inadequate. If cholera passed through the air, how to explain the fact that some members of a family would become ill while others did not, all living under the same roof and breathing the same air? How to explain that workers surrounded by the foulest of odors—“nightsoil handlers” and “flushermen” working with human waste—were not more susceptible to cholera than others? Snow suspected that cholera “poisons” passed through water contaminated with human
waste and had published a pamphlet arguing this in 1849. He did not know how to demonstrate conclusively the disease’s cause, however, and the medical establishment’s confidence in the miasma theory remained unshaken.

The Soho deaths caught Snow’s attention, and he took advantage of the available data. In 1836, Parliament had passed the Registration Act, for the first time requiring personal records to be kept of the recently deceased, including the cause of death. Snow grew increasingly encouraged as he checked the records of the Soho cholera outbreak. He found that every cholera victim had lived within a quarter-mile of the popular Broad Street Pump, a fifteen-foot-deep well known for its clear drinking water. Snow’s theory, though, faced a major obstacle. A widow, Susannah Eley, had died of cholera during the outbreak but lived in Hampstead, nowhere near Soho; another woman had died in Islington, even farther away. If cholera had been transmitted through drinking water at the Broad Street Pump, how had it infected these women so many miles away?

Unwilling to discard his theory, Snow visited the widow’s son to see if there might be some unknown connection with the Broad Street Pump. As Snow heard the story of her death, he grew increasingly intrigued. While the widow had not visited Soho prior to her death, she had previously lived in the area. She so enjoyed the water from the Broad Street Pump that she regularly sent her servant to fill water bottles there. Indeed, she had done so days before her death. The son of the recently deceased widow went on to sadly relate that he had also recently lost a cousin. Had the cousin visited his mother? Snow eagerly inquired. Oh yes, the son replied. In fact, she had drunk the same Soho bottled water as his mother before returning to her home in Islington and dying the next day.

The famed “Ghost Map” from a report written by Snow in 1855 shows the incidences of cholera around the pump. Armed with this conclusive information, Snow persuaded the Soho Parish leaders to remove the pump handle at Broad Street, and the outbreak stopped soon after. This marked both the first time a government had sought to stop the outbreak of a waterborne disease and the birth of the modern field of epidemiology—the study of disease in populations. To honor Snow’s achievements, the International Epidemiology Association boasted a pump handle as its symbol (not to mention the pub, The John Snow, which is located right in front of where the pump used to stand).

John Snow’s map of cholera cases shows clustering around the Broad Street Pump

While rightly celebrated as real-life medical sleuthing that puts
CSI
and its innumerable spin-offs to shame, Snow’s detective work proved particularly persuasive to the Soho Parish leaders because it coincided with scientific developments playing out at the same time. While Antoni van Leeuwenhoek had seen and described the newly discovered world of microorganisms to the British Royal Society in the late 1600s, no connection had been made at the time between disease and these newest known additions to the living world. The hold of the miasmatic theory of disease was slowly loosening
its grip through the nineteenth century, though, thanks to developments in the field of microbiology by Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, Joseph Lister, and others.

The germ theory of disease was premised on two hypotheses: first, that specific diseases are caused by specific microorganisms that live in air and water, and second, that the same germs reproduce from bearers of the same disease, meaning that microorganisms and other life are not created by spontaneous generation. This was still highly controversial in Victorian England, however, and strong opposition arose to Snow’s explanation for the spread of cholera. The
London Medical Gazette
, a leading journal of the day, dismissed his arguments as “an entire failure of proof that the occurrence of any one case could be clearly and unambiguously assigned to the use of the water. … Foul effluvia from the state of the drains [i.e., an airborne miasma from the sewers] afford a more satisfactory explanation of the diffusion of the disease.”

Snow’s findings supported the germ theory, as did the later realization that the mother of an infant suffering from cholera had disposed of the child’s soiled diaper in a cesspit directly adjacent to the Broad Street Pump just days before the cholera outbreak. While the germ theory of disease remained controversial throughout the 1800s, its increasing credibility was crucial in shifting popular attitudes toward the prevalence of waterborne diseases.

The Soho Parish leaders were also well aware of the raging debate at the time over public sanitation. Championed by Edwin Chadwick, the Victorian crusade for improving the sanitary conditions of the urban poor centered on the idea that disease could be prevented. Trained as a lawyer, Chadwick was relentless, leading John Stuart Mill to praise him as the most effective politician of his time. Chadwick accepted the miasmatic theory of disease but opposed common wisdom by arguing that closer attention to drainage, clean drinking water, and removal of waste would greatly improve the well-being of the city’s poor.

In 1832, Chadwick was appointed as a member of the Royal Commission into the Operation of the Poor Laws and served as its secretary. The commission’s work led to reform in how aid was provided to the poor in Britain and resulted in a standing body, the Poor Law Commission, to oversee implementation of the new law. Chadwick served on the commission and used its platform to promote his agenda.