Hi, my name is Nancy Hill, I’m the Museum Manager here at the Mütter.
We’re taking the history of medicine out of the museum, and into the bar to discuss
how disease and medical treatments have influenced how we imbibe today.
It’s another Historical Happy Hour, and this time, we’re discussing beer.
To understand why this drink got so popular, we first need to go back to Victorian era London,
where a contaminated water source led Londoners to choose a more hygienic drink — beer!
From 1800 to 1900, the population of London skyrocketed from about 1 million residents to 6.5 million.
And with that boom in population came a handful of sanitation problems. We’re talking
about rotten meat and carcasses coating the city streets, blackened air from the increased
industrial pollution, and an unbearable smell that could turn the strongest of stomachs.
But one of the most dangerous health hazards was the drinking water. With that many living bodies
and all the livestock required to feed them come a lot of feces. And all of that waste had to go somewhere.
London did not yet have a complete sewer system, so into the River Thames it went.
Mind you, this was before we started separating drinking water from waste water,
so Londoners ingested everything from feces to industrial waste, as well as the germs that come with them.
While modern plumbing and sewage systems were starting to become a thing,
there were a few problems with their sanitation set up that needed to be addressed.
If you were lower to middle income, your basement was a literal cesspool of filth.
Your bathroom simply had a hole that led to a stagnant, damp soup of water and feces.
The cesspool leaked into the groundwater, which led into the central river in London, the Thames.
In fact, these cesspits could only be emptied at night because the stench was
too disgusting during the day. And if you had the means to pay someone to empty your cesspit,
they’d just dump it into the Thames too. It all ended up in the Thames.
There, it met the runoff from industrial waste and sewage, where it mixed and mingled with all kinds
of disease-causing pathogens. This was before everyone had water lines running into their house,
so for drinking water, you had to go to the local public pump. And where did that water come from? Also the Thames.
Vibrio cholerae, the bacterium that causes cholera, was especially common.
We've actually sampled cholera from specimens in the Mütter Museum, including these two.
The one on your left is actually a little bit shorter than it originally was because of that sampling.
Cholera is a potentially fatal disease characterized by watery diarrhea, cramps, and nausea.
According to the WHO, there are still millions of cholera cases a year and tens of thousands of deaths annually,
even with modern treatments. And England was home to a few cholera epidemics including one in 1831 that killed over 20,000 people,
another from 1848 to 1849 that killed over 50,000, and another from 1853 to 1854 that left another 20,000 dead.
Now, these historical Londoners didn’t know that a bacteria caused cholera. And to be fair, no one knew that any
bacteria caused any disease. Back then, public health experts subscribed to something called
the miasma theory of disease. This theory said that disease came from bad, contaminated air, not germs.
And with the putrid smells coming from the Thames and local sewage systems,
you can’t blame the scientists of the day for associating stench with miasmas.
During that last cholera outbreak in 1853, a physician named John Snow — no, not that Jon Snow — deduced that all of
the cholera victims in a specific neighborhood got their water from the same public pump.
So one day, he removed the handle from the well and just like that, the number of cholera cases in that neighborhood dropped.
In the meantime, London’s water supply was still contaminated, so what are they supposed to drink? That’s where beer comes in.
We still don’t know who started this trend or who recommended it, but over time, Londoners started drinking more and more beer as a thirst quencher.
In the 1840s, United Kingdom residents drank on average less than 20 gallons of beer a year, and by the 1870s, it was over 30 gallons a year.
But beer is made from water, so why was it considered safer to drink? Well, the idea that disease-causing agents
could hang out in the water was a new idea, and would take a few decades before it was widely accepted.
But to brew beer, you have to boil the water, which would kill a lot of the pathogens inside.
Same result from the increased acidity and of course the alcohol from fermentation.
Plus, the added hops, which were becoming increasing popular during this time, contained antibacterial polyphenols like lupelin
that might’ve killed some bacteria too. While they didn’t know the biology behind why the beer was safer,
it became pretty clear — if you drink water, you poop your brains out. If you drink beer, you don’t.
There might be a few other health benefits for your average Londoner back then too.
Most beers, both new and old, have multiple B vitamins, antioxidants, and prebiotics which promote healthy gut bacteria.
Plus, beer is high in calories, which the working class welcomed considering they usually had a limited, rancid diet.
So they got to drinking. Although it wasn’t exactly like craft beer today. Those old school beers would’ve been about three percent alcohol by volume,
what’s known as a “small beer”. This was before craft IPAs were all the rage — although they were starting to become popular.
Back then, you probably would’ve gone for a less hoppy, more malty ale.
Wealthier households might’ve chosen to brew their own beer and probably other drinks like mead and spiced wine as well.
While the increased alcohol consumption worked for preventing infectious disease, it also led to more social problems like public intoxication
and domestic violence. So shortly after these epidemics, the British temperance movement,
which included some doctors, tried to move English society away from such heavy drinking.
So we raise our pint glasses to you, beer drinkers of yesterday. Most of us in industrialized countries
are lucky enough to have much cleaner drinking water and can enjoy a pint because we want to,
not because there’s doo doo in the tap water. For more information on infectious diseases then and now,
come visit the Mütter Museum, both online or in person. And make sure to subscribe to our
channel for more about how your favorite alcohols were used in disease treatment and prevention,
and hit the bell icon so you can stay disturbingly informed!