Sanitation

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SANITATION

SANITATION The word "sanitation" only entered the English language in the nineteenth century, and the term is inextricably linked with integrated water and sewer systems. Lacking such technologies, early modern Europeans are often reckoned to have lived without sanitation. Their epidemiology of the time might seem to support this contention: three out of every ten babies born in Geneva between 1580 and 1739 died by their first birthday and the infant mortality rate in late seventeenth-century London was over one in four. Many of these deaths were caused by dirt-related infections like infantile diarrhea—what contemporaries termed "griping in the guts." Moreover, there are many vivid complaints of noxious conditions in early modern cities—one account of 1670s Edinburgh, for instance, claimed that one could not step anywhere in the streets without treading on turds.

Appearing in an Englishman's denunciation of all things Scottish, this claim was designed to promote prejudice. The charge also reveals how early modern people did indeed discriminate between cleanliness and dirt. Their sanitary technology rarely consisted of more than cesspits, chamber pots, and carts to carry ordure from their communities, but early modern Europeans possessed notions of public health and collective salubrity. Furthermore, scholars are now revealing the extent to which they sought to regulate and cleanse their environments.

URBAN DIRT AND URBAN ORDER

Such efforts were rarely entirely successful—early modern utopian writing appreciatively delineated the cleanliness of the ideal community—but civic authorities regularly commanded that streets be swept and nuisances removed. Such sanitary regulation was linked to wider conceptions of order. Noxious wastes shaped social and symbolic geographies. Offensive trades such as butchers and tanners were generally confined to particular districts, often downstream or outside city walls. In Paris the bodies of condemned criminals were buried in the municipal dump at Montfaucon. In central Europe the emptying of cesspits and the removal of waste were associated with other "dishonorable" trades. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, for instance, the "night-king" (chief latrine-cleaner) of Augsburg had to share a residence with the city executioner. Furthermore, precepts for cleansing streets often coincided with drives to rid communities of vagrants and "disorderly persons."

MIRE AND MEDICINE

Medical beliefs further encouraged sanitary care. Throughout the early modern period it was generally believed that plague and other epidemic diseases were caused or spread by corrupt airs or miasma produced by rotting organic matter. Environmental regulation thus sought to prevent evil smells. Perfumes and fumigants were used to purify infected spaces; street cleaning often intensified in periods of epidemic. In late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century London, for instance, householders were required to sweep in front of their houses every morning and evening. During the early seventeenth century the boards of health of northern Italian states energetically sought to remove dunghills and other sources of miasma from the towns and villages under their jurisdiction.

Early modern doctors knew of "miasma" from a range of classical works, especially those of the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates. From the mid-seventeenth century medical authors became preoccupied with one strand of his work—the relation between epidemics and the airs, waters, and weather of particular places. Population statistics derived from bills of mortality and parish registers revealed geographical variations in the incidence of fevers and other fatal diseases; eighteenth-century analyses of air by natural philosophers like the English chemist Joseph Priestley sought to isolate mephitic substances that caused disease. Many eighteenth-century doctors proposed ways of reducing mortality by draining marshes, ventilating buildings, and reorganizing the environments and the ways in which people lived. Such interventions in the physical environment were often associated with proposals for the police of national populations. The term "police" had wider connotations than does its modern usage. It expressed a desire for the regulation of all aspects of life in order to achieve a smoothly functioning polity and (crucially) a healthy and productive population. The work of the German professor Johann Peter Frank exemplified the scale of this concept. His six-volume System of Medical Police (1779–1817) recommended the regulation of everything from midwifery and marriage to water supply and street cleaning.

The impact of medical police was less than the ambition of its advocates. Nevertheless, eighteenth-century Europe did see medically inspired reforms of daily life. In the 1750s, for instance, the British physicians Stephen Hales and John Pringle oversaw the installation of ventilators in the notoriously disease-ridden London prison of Newgate. In the 1780s the French Royal Society of Medicine not only declared that the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents in Paris was so full that it was a threat to public health but also had it closed and all human remains removed from it. More generally there was a considerable extension of new forms of sanitation, bathing and hygiene in hospitals, barracks, and similar institutions.

WATER SUPPLIES

These reforms were restricted by the general scarcity of water in preindustrial Europe. Clearly, this was a pressing problem in arid regions like southern Spain, where elaborate systems of water regulation were developed during the Middle Ages. But water was also a limited and costly resource in northern European communities not associated with drought. In eighteenth-century Paris, for example, a cubic meter of water would have cost a laborer more than two days' wages. Households spent much time and energy fetching water from rivers, streams, and wells. Communal life literally revolved around water sources. In larger urban centers public authorities maintained wells and sponsored schemes to pipe water to public fountains or conduits. In 1585–1587, for instance, Pope Sixtus V established the Acqua Felice, redeveloping the waters of an ancient aqueduct, the Aqua Alexandrina, in order to supply the eastern districts of Rome. Princely and aristocratic fountains like those at Louis XIV's palace of Versailles were, by contrast, ostentatious displays of conspicuous consumption.

The comparative scarcity of water remained a structural characteristic of European society throughout the early modern period. However, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the establishment of the first water companies piping supplies to the houses of private paying customers. The London Bridge Water Company (established 1582) and New River Company, which began supplying London in 1613, were among the first such concerns. They soon had imitators. By around 1700 one could rent a piped water supply in nine of the ten largest English provincial towns. Such companies were unevenly spread across Europe—no water company operated in Paris until after the French Revolution—and the supplies they offered were unreliable and intermittent. However, they did pioneer new technology. Eighteenth-century water companies were among the first users of steam power, and thus laid the foundations for the subsequent industrialization of urban water supplies. In the nineteenth century the intellectual heritage of medical police combined with such technological developments to produce the public reforms that are conventionally associated with the term sanitation.

See also City Planning ; Public Health .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Corbin, Alain. The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination. Cambridge, Mass., 1986.

Jenner, Mark S. R. "From Conduit Community to Commercial Network? Water in London 1500–1725." In Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London. Edited by Paul Griffiths and Mark S. R. Jenner. Manchester, U.K., and New York, 2000.

Riley, J.C. The Eighteenth-Century Campaign Against Disease. Basingstoke, U.K., and London, 1987.

Roche, D. "Le temps de l'eau rare: Du Moyen Age à l'Epoque Moderne." Annales: Economies, sociétés, civilisations 39 (1984): 383–399.