The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [114]
The health-conscious Victorians invented athletics. The first organised meeting was held at the Woolwich Arsenal in 1849; the first inter-university games took place in 1864. In 1854 Alfred Wills captured the public imagination by climbing the Wetterhorn. In 1859 the term ‘calisthenics’was coined: it meant ‘beautiful strength’.
A new gymnasium in Liverpool, 1865. Almost all modern forms of gymnastics are being practised. Note that though ladies are present, they do not indulge in exercise.
Desperate and unsuccessful measures to prevent the spread of cholera. The clothes of plague victims are burnt in Exeter, 1832.
The institutionalisation of sport made it seem a worthier activity. It was also associated with Christian virtues and ethics, described in phrases such as ‘fair play’, ‘It’s not cricket’and ‘Play the game’. Exercise was a test of moral strength, to be practised beyond exhaustion. The virtues expressed in sport made it all the more admirable.
In 1853, a doctor called John Snow, who had worked during a cholera epidemic at the Killingworth colliery in Northumberland, began to suspect that cholera was transmitted on hands which had shared food after being contaminated by diarrhoea or vomit. Snow’s suspicions were confirmed in 1854 when a London well, sited in Golden Square, which had always produced clean water, suddenly killed six hundred local inhabitants. Snow found that a cesspit was overflowing into the well. When the pit was sealed off and the water filtered, the problem disappeared. Two years later, the Medical Officer for London, John Simon, ran tests in nine London parishes which showed that in Lambeth, where sand filters were used in the water supply system, death rates had dropped dramatically.
It was Simon who convinced everyone to support public health measures and who introduced a series of reforms, including the expansion of the hospital system, as well as numerous relevant acts of Parliament. Notable among these was the provision for the first ever rights of entry to private property without permission by state officials who needed to establish the existence of sanitary conditions.
Barrels of pitch and tar are burnt in the street in the hope that the fumes will have a cleansing effect.
An 1850 cartoon of a microscopic view of a drop of London drinking water. Even though water was not known to be the source of cholera at this time, its filthy state gave rise to serious concern.
The building of London’s sewers, 1859. In all, 318 million bricks were used to build 1300 miles of sewers which carried 420 million gallons of effluent a day.
Snow’s hunch was confirmed in 1855. Only one water company had not obeyed the recent legislation aimed at preventing suppliers from lifting their water from the Thames in the urban stretch where the river was most polluted. The company supplied an area of south London, street for street, with another company which had obeyed the law. On the side of the streets supplied by the tainted water ten times more people died from cholera than on the other side.
By the summer of 1858 the Thames smelt so bad that all work at the Houses of Parliament had to be suspended. Members of Parliament finally acted. Legislation was hurriedly passed to renew and develop the entire London sewerage system. When it was finished, all London sewage was being piped away to outfalls in the river eleven miles downstream from the city at a point where tidal flow would take it out to sea. The cholera never returned. The sanitarians were jubilant, and science was still ignorant of the cause of the epidemic.
In 1857 the contagionist argument was strengthened by the work of a professor at the university of Lille. Louis Pasteur was examining fermentation in milk and wines in order to find out what caused them to go sour. He showed that each liquid needed a specific fermentation agent. He saw that the agent