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Hello, everyone! Welcome to lies! You all know the drill.
This is the bit where I get to confess to all the mistakes we made,
own up to the liberties we took,
and tell all the awesome stories, that we just couldn't fit into the episodes, so let's get to it.
This was our shortest series, so this will probably be our shortest lies, but there are a few things
I really need to cover. First the question [of the] map. This is a bit nitpicky, and doesn't really change the history.
But there's some debate over WHEN Jon Snow made his famous map.
The only extant copy we have is the one he submitted with his report, the month after the epidemic was over.
Linguistically, I tried to avoid saying absolutely that he HAD a map during the events,
but I'm pretty firmly on the side that he sketched out the map, to figure out what's going on,
and then just made a more polished version to submit with his report.
Otherwise... I just can't see him doing all this.
Much less convincing the health board, that this was going on.
But it is an open question as to when exactly he penned the map.
Oh!
Onto a much graver topic.
Throughout the episodes, I talked about them "defeating the demon cholera."
I thought about phrasing it as, "they gave us the tools to defeat cholera,"
but I didn't, because I wanted to talk about it here.
Cholera still affects millions of people in developing countries.
Tens of thousands of people a year die from cholera.
And it's this disease, which most of us watching these videos are protected from by things we don't even think about.
And I think humanity is this amazing thing. I think it is incredible how far we've come, and what we've done.
But....
Sometimes it still shocks me that for all the marvels of the modern world,
simple things, things we have the know-how and capacity to beat,
still take tens of thousands of lives a year and still cause just incredible suffering.
And many people express incredulity that the was ever a problem.
Comments are filled with people asking: "Didn't people know better than to drink water contaminated with human waste?"
And it seemed like something we'd all be shocked at.
But the truth is: if you're getting your water from a river or well,
it's actually pretty hard to tell if it's contaminated.
I mean, we're talking about the seepage of microbes.
We're talking about waste that's diluted by a flow of an entire river.
But...
Today, we know this is a problem, and the more I research the topic,
the more it stood as a shocking reminder of how non-universal even some of our older triumphs of medicine and science are today.
But anyway... this leads me back to the episode.
Remember how we talked about the fact that all this waste is diluted by the massive flow of the Thames?
Well, that's actually why so many people dismiss the possibility of the disease being in the water.
The germ theory of disease didn't have observational backing yet, right?
It wasn't accepted.
But!
Educated people of the era, especially in the field of medicine, were eminently familiar with chemistry, right?
We're in that period of history.
And so, many of them, even if they weren't hardcore Miasmatists,
conceptualize disease more like a chemical poison.
Which, of course, made the idea that the disease was spread through the Thames water ridiculous.
Because any poison, even the strongest known to man, be instantly diluted to the point of being harmless, by the vast outflow of the river.
What they didn't have, was this idea that a disease could be self-replicating,
that even the smallest sample - unlike a chemical -
could reproduce in the body, to the point where it could be something deadly.
And this is something which seems so intuitive to us with our modern understanding of the world,
but when you try and sort of put yourself back in the minds of the day,
This is all these great conceptual leaps.
And it always makes me wonder.
It makes me think about what basic conceptual underpinnings of the world that we haven't found yet,
that people will take totally as given in a hundred years.
Oh! And that reminds me:
a lot of people in the comments seem to think that Louis Pasteur invented the germ theory of disease.
And so here it would serve as an anachronism.
But it's actually been around in one form or another, since the 17th--16th Century, with a guy named:
(slowly speaking): Girolamo Fracastoro... I think...
Go look it up, because I'm sure I butchered that.
And so though Pasteur absolutely deserves credit, for proving beyond a doubt that the germ theory of disease was a real thing,
and thus in many ways ushered in the era of Modern medicine,
he wasn't the very first person to have thought down these lines.
You know, maybe maybe one day he should get an Extra History episode. I mean, he certainly deserves it!
Oh! Another thing that many of you asked was:
Why so many people resisted Snow's discoveries, despite what seems like such clear evidence to us?
And, I mean, I can't really answer that question. Humans are funny things.
We like to think of ourselves as rational,
but sometimes people deny things, that are so clearly and demonstrably true, for profit.
Sometimes, they deny things because otherwise they invalidate most of what they've done in their whole lives
or because it would simply make so much of what they put their time into, wrong.
Sometimes it's pride.
And sometimes, simply the horror of having to face what it would mean, if you accepted this new truth.
Imagine if you were a doctor back then, and I mean truly a good person.
And you spent your life healing people, trying to make them better.
Imagine how hard it would be to face the reality of what you've been doing.
You're bleeding and leeching people, imagine you've been making people worse.
You've been killing them.
I can see how some people might not be able to look that in the eye.
But on a less somber note:
one pattern I have seen with history, is that truth does win.
I mean, that it may take time and that time may have an impossible cost in lives and suffering,
but in the end, evidence and truth wins out, as generations pass.
It's hard sometimes, in our short lifetimes to see. Five years feels like forever, forty feels like a lifetime,
but one of the things I like about studying history is this constant march forward - at least from the fall of Rome -
that shows us that all of our struggles that may seem so futile, that make us feel like
just throwing our hands up in the air, and saying, "Nothing ever gets done, why should I try?"
They really do matter.
Imagine how John Snow must've felt.
He didn't even live to see himself vindicated.
At every turn, he was met by people who dismissed him, no matter how clearly right he was.
And yet, today, if we give him the foundation of Epidemiology,
a little bit of Sanitation Movement, some tiny credit towards germ theory of disease,
his works led toward the salvation of millions of lives.
And now, today, almost all of us think like Jon Snow,
we have the same conceptualization of the world. We believe him to be right.
And so, in studying history, it just always reminds me that the fight is worth it.
And there are some days that I need that.
But I've been way too dour for something as awesome as Jon Snow!
So let's just have fun with the rest of this, because there are so many ridiculous things here:
(laughing)
For example - and I feel terrible about cracking up at this because I know it was dangerous, I know it was awful -
But, you know how we talked about the cesspit under the house?
Well that was a really common thing at the time, and you know what cesspits generate?
Methane! And what did we have a lot of before electric lighting?
Fire! And so periodically in London, people's cesspits would just [makes explosion noise] explode!
And so now you not only have poop in the streets, but exploding cesspits.
And it still took a while for people to get behind the idea of sewers!
Oh, speaking of which...
I have to give a shout-out to Joseph Bazalgette, the lead engineer of the whole London sewer system.
This guy was awesome, not only was he meticulous and hands-on,
but he was really forward-thinking.
He had the foresight to realise, that this was the only time
they were ever going to let him do this, so better get this right for at the least the next 200 years.
And so after making careful calculations of the sewage output of the city at its present size,
which is something that I always crack up a little [at] imagining him trying to do,
because without modern sewage, without automatic measuring,
how do you find out, the average sewage output of a household?
Other than going door to door, knocking and asking?
Anyway... After doing the calculations,
he demanded that they future proof the system, by using pipes that were multiples of the size that the calculation showed was needed.
And that's why London is still using that sewer system.
If they had gone with the original plans, the sewers would have overflowed in the 60's.
Oh, and since I'm talking about sewers. In the history of sewers.
I really want to talk about the Roman "Cloaca Maxima".
The Cloaca Maxima is the famous great sewer of ancient Rome.
It's part of why Rome could grow to the size it did.
And it is a marvel of engineering.
And basically the Romans are trying to drain some swamps,
and they just covered the outflow of those, and turned it into the sewers,
and then they connected it to the public latrines, and the baths, to remove the non-potable water and the waste.
And it was a sewage system.
But the thing to remember about the Cloaca Maxima, unlike modern sewer systems,
is that most homes were not connected to it.
There's all sorts of Roman laws about throwing your waste out the window.
In fact, so many it's kind of horrifying to think about how many people in Rome must have been hit by flying human waste...
But anyway...
Point is, there was never this massive public works project
to try and connect the ever changing hodgepodge that was Rome, to the sewers.
So, while actually several ancient cultures built some incredible sanitation systems, more than 2,000 years ago,
with the Cloaca Maxima being the epitome of that.
We only get the first true comprehensive sanitation system with the Sanitation Movement in the 19th century.
Oh! And that leads me to Chicago!
'Cuz a number of people want to know how you lift the city.
I'll put the Wikipedia link below because it's so just unbelievable,
But the raising of Chicago,
to answer your question on how you raise a city:
I mean seriously, the answer, I kid you not, is:
On jacks!
Yeah. They just put jacks under the buildings, jack them up,
put in a new foundation and a sewer system, and called it a day!
I was trying to think about us doing something like that today.
Can you imagine downtown of your city just hanging out, sitting a few feet up in the air on jacks?
With the businesses still open? But anyway...
I think before I go, I probably should apologize for pronunciation.
I'm sure there's all sorts of British pronunciation gone wrong like,
(tongue-tied over the word): pronouncing.
Like if I could pronounce pronouncing.
Southwark like "south-work" like Americans. Instead of "Sutherk" which it is.
And I'm sure even in this live video, I butchered a ton of pronunciation.
So forgive us on pronunciation, but on the plus side:
I don't think we have any flags to get wrong this time around.
Oh! And speak of my homeland America.
You know we thought, we've caused cholera?
The Irish, kid you not!
Oh and on a totally random note, since I finally actually have the time to tell my anecdotes...
Did you know John Snow was an ardent member of the temperance movement?
Maybe you did, right, if you looked him up you probably did.
But did you know, he was also, for a while, a vegetarian?
And it's hilarious to me because apparently he confused just all the cooks.
In the 19th century in England, they couldn't understand the idea of not eating meat.
So there's all these stories of him struggling as much, to get into people that, no, he really didn't want a steak,
as he did to convince them that, yes, disease really could be transmitted, but through water.
But alright...
I'll stop because it's Walpole time!
The easy go-to here is Spencer Horatio Walpole
who was the home secretary during outbreak and
Much of the communication that was about the causes and what had to be done went through him, but that's too easy
[so] we could go with the back the whole private pumping station pumping long water into London thing happened while Walpole's prime minister,
but it wouldn't be a Walpole fact without him stealing something, so
remember how John Snow appealed the public board of health and that board of health was established under the public health act of
1848 by Prime Minister
John Russell? Well, John Russell was from an old British family which had held many peerages and
one of his extended clan was Edward Russell, the first earl of Orford back in the 1700s.
After the first earl of Orford passed away with no heir, guess who got it given to himself?
Robert Walpole!
Yoink! [oh] wait, Walpole in three. Oh actually I guess one and one and three
Because that's what you get when you're in England only a century out from him
But it's time to wrap it up as this goes live
so too should be the fabulous Sherlock Holmesy music by the Kinders
It's great. If you like the ending music to this episode, you should take a listen
and if any of you are wondering
After this I was good like bait and switch there after this
we're doing a couple of episodes - because we do everything in six episode blocks -
So we're doing a couple of episodes on Mary Seacole because you know cholera and cholera. They fit together, then we're taking a break and
then
Then we're finally gonna get to finish the Justinian episodes which I am
super excited for, so thank you everybody on Patreon who voted for Justinian both times
to allow me to finish that story because it's one
I've really wanted to finish ever since that last episode came to an end
and I hope you guys are all as excited for getting back to Constantinople as I am
Have a happy feast of Sol Invictus, everyone. I will see you in a few weeks. Take care!
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