News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Princess Alice disaster: The Thames' 650 forgotten dead. Parent comment

Re:Princess Alice disaster: The Thames' 650 forgotten dead by petercooper on Tuesday September 04, 2018 @09:32AM (#17908886)
Just how vile and dangerous the Thames was in Victorian times can't be underplayed though (my mother remains pretty vocal about how terrible it was in the 60s!). The idea of moving Parliament out of London was even considered as the smell from the Thames was affecting daily life as far upstream as Westminster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stink

An interesting aside related to the Princess Alice disaster is that the main northern sewer was only finally fully working months before the disaster and its outflow was very close to the crash site. Work began in the next decade to purify the sewage rather than just dumping it into the Thames there.

But I'd argue (and this is just a hunch) that sewage was "deadly" then in the sense that if the water then were as clean as now, the death toll would have been far lower, especially as the crash happened so close to (admittedly rather muddy) land.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Princess Alice disaster: The Thames' 650 forgotten dead by cstross on Tuesday September 04, 2018 @09:44AM (#17908958)
Sewage was widely believed to be deadly due to its association with "night airs", which the (now disproven) miasma theory of disease held was responsible for many infections. While John Snow demonstrated the epidemiological evidence for contagion (physical contact) as the mechanism for disease transmission in 1857, actual proof that bacteria were the caustative agent in contagious infectious disease only became available in the late 1870s (via the work of, in particular, Robert Koch and Louis Pasteir), and medical opinion (as with public opinion) was slow to adapt to new scientific findings in those days.

More on the miasma theory of disease here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miasma_theory

[ Parent | on HN ]