conuly | This is the third time this week.

Listen, if you're going to trot out that old canard about how water in the middle ages was universally dirty because our ancestors were too stupid to understand that you shouldn't drink stagnant water with poop in it, therefore they were all drunk all the time which didn't help - well, you should stop doing that. But, more importantly, you should stop talking about the Broad Street Pump, and cholera in general.

1. The Broad Street Pump incident is definitely not medieval. Different set of people, different situation, not relevant to this conversation.

2. While there certainly are other serious waterborne illnesses and parasites, cholera didn't leave the Indian subcontinent until 1817. We don't even have a confirmed outbreak in India until the mid 1500s. And you might be justified in thinking that the 1560s are medieval or at least medieval-adjacent, but you can't seriously think that about the 1800s. This isn't to say that Indian deaths from cholera prior to the first cholera pandemic don't count... but honestly, most of the people making this argument aren't thinking about India at all, they're hyper-focused on Europe.

3. Our ancestors might not have understood germ theory, but they weren't actually stupid. And more importantly, humans have evolved with an extremely sensitive sense of revulsion that kicks in whenever we're around something disgusting or something that we ate right before a bout of gastrointestinal illness. It's so finely-tuned that it even kicks in a lot for things which cannot make you sick. How many times have we all said "I'm going to throw up" in response to something morally reprehensible? How many people express extreme distaste for people on the fringes of society? People definitely understood that drinking water that smelled bad or that flowed near dead bodies or poop was a bad idea. This strong distaste for such things, in many societies, extended to disliking anybody who worked with dead bodies or poop or other "unclean" things.

In conclusion, our ancestors just liked to drink alcohol more than they liked to drink water. Except for those in societies which avoid alcohol consumption.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

kengr

Also, "small beer" (more or less equivalent to O'Douls or other "near beer" these days) and watered wine are pretty darn hard to get drunk on.

From:

conuly

Yes, thanks.

From:

lilysea

Yes, I was just coming here to say that.

From:

lilysea

Before there was germ theory, people believed that disease was caused by "miasmas" -
bad water;
bad air from swamps/stagnant water.

Avoid most sources of "miasma" and you avoid many sources of disease.

For example, they believed that the bad night air from still water = fever. It was actually malaria, but the advice to live in high windy hilly places as far away as possible from still water was protective against mosquitos.

Side note: there used to be malaria in Italy, also in Britain.

From:

conuly

Yes, malaria is etymologically "bad air". Not everybody believed in the miasma theory of disease - some people in areas with a lot of malaria believed in the evil spirit theory of disease. Evil spirits, of course, hang out in wet, unpleasant places that have many mosquitoes. So long as you avoid those places you don't get malaria.

(I know about Italy too. That's one reason that sickle cell anemia is so common in Mediterranean populations. Drain the swamp is a fascist phrase, which originally referred to literally draining a huge, mosquito infested swamp.)

From:

lilysea

In 1666, the village of Eyam quarantined the entire village to stop plague spreading outwards from infected people in Eyam to surrounding villages. That shows an understanding of contagion, even without germ theory.

"The history of the plague in the village began in 1665 when a flea-infested bundle of cloth arrived from London for Alexander Hadfield, the local tailor. Within a week his assistant George Viccars, who noticing the bundle was damp, had opened it up. Before long he was dead and more began dying in the household soon after.

As the disease spread, the villagers turned for leadership to their rector, the Reverend William Mompesson, and the ejected Puritan minister Thomas Stanley.

They introduced a number of precautions to slow the spread of the illness from May 1666.

The measures included the arrangement that families were to bury their own dead and relocation of church services to the natural amphitheatre of Cucklett Delph, allowing villagers to separate themselves and so reducing the risk of infection.

Perhaps the best-known decision was to quarantine the entire village to prevent further spread of the disease.

Merchants from surrounding villages sent supplies that they would leave on marked rocks; the villagers then made holes there which they would fill with vinegar to disinfect the money left as payment.

The village's actions prevented the disease from moving into surrounding areas."

From:

lilysea

And you might be justified in thinking that the 1560s are medieval or at least medieval-adjacent, but you can't seriously think that about the 1800s.

When I did history at university

historians strongly distinguish between

Medieval history, which starts with the fall of the Roman empire in 500 AD and ends in 1500

and Early Modern history, which is from 1500-1700.

You find all sorts of things in Early Modern history that you don't find in medieval history, like Protestants and Quakers and Puritans...

In Germany, around 1440, goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press

William Caxton introduced a printing press into England in 1476

Martin Luther's Ninety-five Theses [in Latin] were printed in several locations in Germany in 1517, which was the start of what would become Protestantism

Edited Date: 2020-09-26 06:15 am (UTC)

From:

conuly

Yes, what I meant is "somebody who doesn't know much about history might think this, but nobody should be ignorant enough to think THAT".

From:

lilysea

...it is possible that having a Bachelor of Arts with first class honours in medieval and Early Modern history

has given me a distorted view of what [the average person on the street] knows about history...

From:

peoriapeoriawhereart

I've often enough had to explain that history isn't just about names and dates. I took a course on Pre-Modern European history.

From:

peristaltor

You've read The Ghost Map, I trust? One of Johnson's best.

From:

el_staplador

Have you come across Going Medieval? Feels kind of relevant here...

From:

conuly

You mean

going_medieval_rss_feed?

From:

oursin

People knew very well that you got STIs from person to person contagion!

And on cholera, the Broad St Pump etc, an awful lot of this was due to runaway urbanisation outrunning effective sewage disposal systems in the immediately post-industrial revolution era. And as for people drinking foul water, one of the problems with the Broad St Pump and Snow mapping cases, was that, the water tasted nice, people sent for it from other parts of London...

From:

conuly

Society just wasn't set up for Victorian cities.

From:

lilysea

People knew very well that you got STIs from person to person contagion!

Yes and no... in the Early Modern period

There was lots of writing about how people caught syphilis as a baby from wetnurses [possible, but there was far more transmission from babies with congenital syphilis to wetnurses than there was the other way round.

There was also lots of writing for Bishops about how Bishops caught syphilis from sharing toilet stools and giving alms to beggars...

There were actually "two syphilises" in Early Modern popular culture [even tho in reality they were exactly the same disease]

if you were rich/noble/clerical, you had "mild syphilis" which people believed that you caught as a baby from your wetnurse; from sharing toilet stools; from giving alms. This was considered treatable.

If you were poor, you had "severe syphilis" which people believed that you caught from sex which was considered untreatable.

In reality they were exactly the same disease with exactly the same outcome, but people genuinely wrote about them at the time as though they were two different diseases.

From:

oursin

Oh yes, the idea that you could get STIs indirectly was pervasive well into C20th (and there was a whole resurgence around HIV/AIDS), but it did usually involve touch of some kind, even if only of toilet seat or some other intermediary object (e.g. there was a whole thing about public drinking fountains and not using the common cups), rather than miasma. Which meant that reformers could go and preach against VICE in the brothel district without fear of coming home with A Loathsome Disease.

I seem to recollect some moderately amusing tales about Army chaplains in World War I explaining to the Regimental MOs how they had got the clap... the clerical excuses also have a long history.

From:

oloriel

Since we have medieval warnings about drinking water from impure or foul-smelling sources and stagnant ponds, it's fair to assume that people weren't opposed to drinking water in general - after all, if nobody did it, there would've been no need to warn people about it.

But as you say, then as now, people just liked to have something more flavourful than plain water!

From:

conuly

For that matter, look no further than the lie that Jews poison wells. If nobody drinks the water, why is there even a well in the first place?

From:

oloriel

For bathing, of course! Oh, wait, everybody knows that nobody bathed in the Middle Ages (TM), either...

(Of course, you need water for cooking and brewing beer, too, and the poison might not get killed off by heat or fermentation. So this is less of a no-brainer than it might seem at first.)

Edited Date: 2020-09-26 03:41 pm (UTC)

From:

hudebnik

I'm not sure exactly which theory you're debunking.

I've frequently heard that our medieval ancestors knew perfectly well that stagnant water carried disease, but didn't have a lot of ways to sanitize it, and one of those was fermentation, so they drank small beer because it was less likely to make you sick than water of unknown origin.

From:

conuly

From what I know, historians generally reject that. People in the past drank beer because they preferred the taste to that of water.

From:

oloriel

One day, pop cultural knowledge will probably say that people in the 20th century drank coffee and tea in the morning exclusively because they had to boil their water to make it potable.

From:

conuly

Maybe!

(Of course, boiling does nothing to reduce the concentration of heavy metals....)

From:

ioplokon

Right, I think the beer to avoid unclean water angle is very accurate when talking about urbanization and the Victorian city... Less so the middle ages.

I always connected it to wanting to get calories+carbs+hydration after (esp physical) work. Same today with post-work beers and also many pro & amateur athletes like to get beers post-game/ride/etc. (Eta: by which I mean, why beer rather than shots or hard seltzer or whatever. The delicious, delicious carbs)

Edited Date: 2020-09-26 05:03 pm (UTC)

From:

conuly

It's possible that urban Victorians should've avoided water. The Broad Street Pump incident shows that they didn't - indeed, one affected household wasn't anywhere near the pump, they just liked the taste of the water and brought it home to drink.

From:

ioplokon

Right but like, there is a lot of Victorian-Era after 1854? I dunno, I guess it's hard to know if people avoided it but people were definitely concerned about it, based on newspapers I've read from the late Victorian era. Then again, the fact that you kind of can't wash clothes or food or bodies in beer makes wanting to avoid water a bit of a moot point, I guess.

From:

oursin

Also there was a massive temperance movement which was against drinking alcohol, and it wasn't just a top-down thing, it was also nonconformist/respectable working-classes delineating themselves from the drunken layabouts.

I'd want to go away and look at the rise of proprietary non-alcoholic drinks at this period, and the purveying of spa waters in bottled form. I've just looked up the history of Schweppes, who were marketing Malvern water from the 1840s off a track record in carbonated water.

From:

ioplokon

I think I just internalized the idea that they all drank coffee and tea which is not evident if you stop to think about it but colors the rest of the assumption (plus I'm a literature student, more than a historian and like uh.... drinking water, like, a big old glass of flat water, is really not something mentioned in books of the period... now I want to build a concordance of public domain works that mention water and make a database of when water-drinking is mentioned & track over time...). Still, I should have been thinking of the spa stuff since obviously there are novels like Humphrey Clinker (though, of course, that's significantly earlier and also the depiction is clearly derisive).

From:

oursin

This looks like quite a nice introduction to Victorian temperance: http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=annemarie-mcallister-on-the-temperance-movement - suggests that 'water-drinking' was in fact a motif.

From:

conuly

Well, people probably don't talk about going to the bathroom much in that literature either, but they still did pee.

From:

ioplokon

Yes obviously. I just think it's helpful when you find out you have a faulty assumption to look at how you got there. I'm genuinely not trying to be a pain.

From:

conuly

Of course not! Listen, so long as you know it's a pump and not a damn well, we're cool.

From:

ioplokon

Well.... At least I know that! (Sorry... Not a great pun...)

From:

conuly

All puns are great puns.

From:

pauamma

Does the term "medieval period" even make sense when applied to the history of India?

From:

conuly

Honestly, I don't know.

From:

highlyeccentric

Congratulations you have discovered the key disciplinary beef of the thing tentatively known as "the global middle ages". (I would say yes, Eurasia-and-africa* being sufficiently interlinked by trade networks that reached from china to ireland, but with extreme caveats. *and possibly this only applies to north-of-the-sahara africa? I'm not sure. Ibn Battutah did travel to Madagascar, so surely there were sea links with southern africa?)

From:

pauamma

Thanks. I'm not an historian, but I'm curious about that concept and its limits. Would https://globalmiddleages.history.ox.ac.uk/ be a good starting point? (Also, that site needs contact info. There's a splendid typo in the second last paragraph and I'm not sure offhand who to report it to. ETA: found a candidate in https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/defining-global-middle-ages#tab-266991.)

Edited (found one) Date: 2020-09-27 11:30 am (UTC)

From:

highlyeccentric

Yes certainly, although it won't find you the people who object to the use of that framing! My thinking on the Afro-Eurasia networked "middle ages" as useful (although not for all purposes) is informed by The Indomedieval blog/erstwhile twitter

From:

pauamma

Thanks. I'll have a closer look at both.

From:

silveradept

Generally speaking, anyone putting forward the theory that the people in the 400-1400 period were not smart has already told you they're not particularly smart about history.

Also, flavored water is generally pretty delicious.