At Home - Bill Bryson [199]
The new sewage outfalls did, however, have an unfortunate role in the greatest tragedy ever experienced on the Thames. In September 1878, a pleasure boat named the Princess Alice, packed to overflowing with day-trippers, was returning to London after a day at the seaside, when it collided with another ship at Barking at the very place and moment when the two giant outfall pipes surged into action. The Princess Alice sank in less than five minutes. Nearly eight hundred people drowned in a choking sludge of raw sewage. Even those who could swim found it nearly impossible to make headway through the glutinous filth. For days afterward bodies bobbed to the surface. Many, the Times reported, were so bloated with gaseous bacteria that they wouldn’t fit into normal coffins.
Construction of a sewage tunnel near Old Ford in Bow, East London (photo credit 16.1)
In 1876, Robert Koch, then an unknown country doctor in Germany, identified the microbe, Bacillus anthracis, responsible for anthrax. Seven years later, he identified Vibrio cholerae, another bacillus, as the cause of cholera. At long last there was proof that individual microorganisms caused specific diseases. It is remarkable to think that we have had electric lights and telephones for about as long as we have known that germs kill people. Edwin Chadwick never did believe that, and continued throughout his life to suggest ways of eliminating odors as the most effective method for keeping people healthy. One of his last and more singular proposals was to build across London a series of towers modeled on the new Eiffel Tower in Paris. In Chadwick’s vision, the towers would act as mighty ventilators, pulling in fresh, healthful air from the heights and pumping it back out at ground level. He went to his grave in the summer of 1890 implacably convinced that the cause of epidemics was atmospheric vapors.
Bazalgette, meanwhile, moved on to other projects. He built some of London’s handsomest bridges—at Hammersmith, Battersea, and Putney—and drove through the heart of London several bold new streets designed to alleviate congestion, including Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue. Late in life he was knighted, but he never really received the fame he deserved. Sewer engineers seldom do. He is commemorated with a modest statue on the Victoria Embankment beside the Thames. He died a few months after Edwin Chadwick.
III
In America, the situation was more complicated than in England. Travelers to North America were often struck by the fact that epidemics tended to be rarer and milder there. There was a good reason for this: American communities were generally cleaner. This was not so much because Americans were more fastidious in their habits as because their communities were more open and spacious, creating less chance for contamination and cross-infection. At the same time, however, people in the New World had several additional diseases to contend with, and some of them were completely mystifying. One such was “the milk sick.” People who drank milk in America sometimes grew delirious and swiftly died—Abraham Lincoln’s mother was one such victim—but infected milk tasted and smelled no different from ordinary milk, and no one knew what the infectious agent was. Not until well into the nineteenth century did anyone finally deduce that it came from cows grazing on a plant called white snakeroot, which was harmless to the cows but made their milk toxic to drink.
Even more lethal and widely feared was yellow fever. A viral disease, it was called yellow fever because the skin of victims often turned sallow. The real symptoms, however, were high fever and black vomit. Yellow fever came into America aboard slave ships from Africa. The first case was in Barbados in 1647. It was a horrible disease. A doctor who got it said it felt “as if three or four hooks were fastened onto the globe of each eye and some person, standing behind me, was dragging them forcibly from their orbits back into the head.” Nobody knew