[www.keralites.net] Pre-Industrial Life Was Filthy. ( Long & Interesting)

 

Why Pre-Industrial Life Was Anything But Paradise By Richard Stockton The modern world comes with its share of drawbacks, but at least we have dentists. Modern life is hectic and demanding. We all seem to be short on time and stuck with more work than we know how to handle — so much so that from time to time, we might wish we could have lived in a simpler, less stressful age. Back before the days of industrialization, some may think, the world was a more relaxed and open space with fresh air, predictable work patterns, and simple ways of doing things. While in some ways that may be so, this bucolic view of history overlooks one thing: The past was filthy. Ancient Cities Were Basically Open Sewers It took people a really long time to figure out how to live in cities. For thousands of years, town planning meant little more than putting houses close together and hoping for the best. As a result, ancient cities were deathtraps full of overcrowding, disease, and filth. Especially filth. There is perhaps no better testament to that than the Roman city of Pompeii. Immaculately preserved since its total destruction by volcano in 79 AD, its volcanic ash-preserved ruins offer us insight into how the ordinary people really lived during the golden age of the Roman Empire. Better still, Pompeii was a resort town that attracted wealthy vacationers from all over the Mediterranean to spend their money and live in the lap of luxury. It was the Acapulco of its day — and nearly every street was piled high with garbage and cut through with running sewage. Excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum reveal that the typical Roman citizen, living in the glory that was Rome, kept a cesspit next to the fresh water cistern and casually heaved broken pottery and animal waste into the yard. When a family's cesspit was full, they put a cover over it and either dug a new one or stepped outside to relieve themselves on the garbage everybody else tossed into the street. Very wealthy people had running water in their homes – delivered through lead pipes that gave everyone heavy metal poisoning – but those got shut off when the water supply was low, and then the rich had to empty their bladders in the same holes and alleys as the poor. Here's Roman poet Juvenal, writing a few decades after Pompeii was destroyed, warning his audience about the dangers of walking through the nighttime streets in Rome itself: "Consider now the various other nocturnal perils: how far it is up to those towering floors from which a potsherd smashes your brains; how often leaky and broken fragments fall from the windows; and with what impact they strike the pavement, leaving it chipped and shattered. You may well be regarded as slack, and heedless of sudden disaster, if you fail to make your will before going out to dinner. There's a separate form of death that night in every window that watches you passing beneath it. So hope, and utter a pious prayer, as you walk along that they may be willing to jettison only what's in their slop-pails." Medieval Cities Smelled Really Bad, Too Wikimedia CommonsA Punch magazine cartoon addressing the death caused by pollution in London's River Thames. Medieval London was no better than Pompeii; in fact, it was worse in a lot of ways. Pre-industrial England was a society of farms and livestock. Ordinary people couldn't keep their farms in the city, of course, but they sure kept their livestock. Medieval English farmers kept cows, pigs, and sheep anywhere they lived, and in an age before trucks, waste disposal for all those animals was in the hands – literally – of specialized street cleaners called muck rakers. Their solution to the problem was to dump the mess into the Thames, which also caught the runoff from the slaughterhouses and tanneries in the city, where boiled excrement was used to soften leather and vats of urine were used to treat wool. People's houses were just as bad as public spaces. Most city-dwellers' homes had wooden or clay floors that were covered with rushes or straw. The top layer would occasionally get scraped off and thrown out, but the lower layers could sit undisturbed for a lifetime. Here's a 15th-century account from Dutch scholar Erasmus, complaining about the caked filth on people's floors: "[The floors] are covered with rushes, occasionally renewed, but so imperfectly that the bottom layer is left undisturbed, sometimes for twenty years, harbouring expectoration, vomiting, the leakage of dogs and men, ale droppings, scraps of fish, and other abominations not fit to be mentioned. Whenever the weather changes a vapour is exhaled, which I consider very detrimental to health… I am confident the island would be much more salubrious if the use of rushes were abandoned, and if the rooms were built in such a way as to be exposed to the sky on two or three sides, and all the windows so built as to be opened or closed at once, and so completely closed as not to admit the foul air through chinks; for as it is beneficial to health to admit the air, so it is equally beneficial at times to exclude it" Rural Life Was Worse Than Urban Life Most of the people who have ever lived did so as farm workers. Depending on the society, between 80 and 90 percent of people might have been tied to the land in some way, and most seemed to live lives of quiet desperation, judging by how eager they were to escape to the city. It isn't hard to see why; peasant labor in the fields required spreading animal and human dung over the soil, and then digging in it to plant seeds and pull up weeds. Animal butchery usually took place at home, with the entrails and other waste carried out to the hogs as slop. In Northern Europe, during the long, cold winters, households kept animals indoors, with all of the odor and disease that comes with it. A typical medieval or ancient peasant looked dirty from the day's work, wore the same outfit from one day to the next, and smelled like the goats he slept next to. The unpleasantness didn't stop with the harvest. Remember that all food on the farm had to be made from scratch, so every dwelling had a woman in front of it stripping feathers off of a rooster or goose, assuming the family had meat to spare. In Europe, the staple diet of the 13th century was potage, which was a kind of soup made from whatever scraps of bread or meal were lying around, all dissolved in beer and eaten with a wooden spoon or the fingers. Worse, the beer tasted terrible because Flemish hops weren't available in most areas until the 1500s. While we have few firsthand accounts of peasant life, this passage from the Salic Law (from Dark Ages France) provides an interesting peek into how bad the rural poverty could get: "If any one shall have dug up and plundered a corpse already buried, and it shall have been proved on him, he shall be outlawed until the day when he comes to an agreement with the relatives of the dead man, and they ask for him that he be allowed to come [back] among men." Diseases And Wounds Were Gory And Omnipresent As you would expect for people with a monotonous high-carb diet, and whose physical exercise seems to have included grave robbing, many people of the pre-industrial era walked around with some hideous diseases. They also hobbled around; in a pre-scientific age, what are now easily treatable diseases such as leprosy, diabetes, and dysentery meant death or disability to huge numbers of people. Some times and places were worse than others. Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio described what the Black Death looked like in 14th-century Florence: "The symptoms were not the same as in the East, where a gush of blood from the nose was the plain sign of inevitable death; but it began both in men and women with certain swellings in the groin or under the armpit. . . Soon after this the symptoms changed and black or purple spots appeared on the arms or thighs or any other part of the body, sometimes a few large ones, sometimes many little ones. These spots were a certain sign of death, just as the original tumor had been and still remained." Even the less dramatic ailments abounded, as did the most appalling injuries. Medical treatment of the time didn't have access to germ theory or handwashing, so quite a few people lived with open sores and amputated limbs. From the account of Muslim soldier Usamah ibn Munqidh, who was attached to the court of Saladin: "The king of the Franks had for treasurer a knight named Bernard, who (may Allah's curse be upon him!) was one of the most accursed and wicked among the Franks. A horse kicked him in the leg, which was subsequently infected and which opened in 14 different places. Every time one of these cuts would close in one place, another would open in another place. All this happened while I was praying for his perdition. Then came to him a Frankish physician and removed from the leg all the ointments which were on it and began to wash it with very strong vinegar. By this treatment all the cuts were healed and the man became well again. He was up again like a devil."

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Posted by: Cool Kis <cooolkis@gmail.com>

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