Speaking of things that irritate me

[conuly]

Mr. Broad Street Well has come back and told me that the pump was "of course" a well because "they didn't have piped water in those days".

I don't know if he thinks they didn't have aqueducts in Europe yet or if he simply thinks that London didn't have any municipal water system other than local wells, but either way he's wrong. The first statement is extremely wrong, and the second is just very wrong - but still, he's wrong and I have told him so. One of the ways we know our ancestors drank water is because they spent a great deal of money building and maintaining infrastructure to pipe water in to crowded areas.

********

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Comments

[conuly]

Yup.

And his response to me telling him I'd reconsider my position if he could find a historian to cite who agrees that people in the historic past may have not drunk water due to contamination was to... link me to a book on the Broad Street Pump incident.

I'm not sure if it's worse that he thinks continuing to harp on this one single incident creates the impression that this was widespread throughout history OR if it's worse that he doesn't understand the difference between a historian and an author who majored in literature, but either way, it's not good.

[oursin]

The context of that famous 'Monster Soup' cartoon (I have a mug with this on) was precisely that people were routinely drinking Thames water! (is he really arguing without even looking up Wikipedia on London's Water Supply??? OMG WTF boggle)

[conuly]

I'm really curious now as to what historians think of his cited book.

[oursin]

Not currently running with cutting-edge historians of Victorian sanitarian interventions, but what is the book?

[conuly]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ghost_Map

[conuly]

Though I've never read it, so I'll give the author the credit of not accusing the Victorians of having totally forgotten about their pre-existing infrastructure.

[oursin]

I've never read it, but the reviewer for The Lancet was distinctly snarky and tending to dismiss it as pop history, though as he works in similar areas, may be a certain professional rivalry going on there! Other reviews tend to suggest over-simplification and prioritising telling a good story.

[conuly]

Incidentally, several things I've read since the start of the pandemic suggest a. aerosol transmission of disease is a lot more common than medical research indicated because b. doctors were so eager to dismiss the miasma theory that they tossed the baby out with the bathwater and now people hardly ever consider it.