This is the third time this week.

[conuly]

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.

Comments

[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.

[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.)