Stephen Baselger's asthma was the leading idea of how diseases were transmitted. Leading sanitary reformers like Edwin Chadwick asserted that all smell is disease. Cholera tended to affect people from widely different areas, depending on where they got their water from. Do we have any idea how many people were dying because of the pollution of the river?
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the stench from the River Thames in the hot summer of 1858 and how it appalled and terrified Londoners living and working beside it, including those in the new Houses of Parliament which were still under construction. There had been an outbreak of cholera a few years before in which tens of thousands had died, and a popular theory held that foul smells were linked to diseases. The source of the problem was that London's sewage, once carted off to fertilise fields had recently, thanks to the modern flushing systems, started to flow into the river and, thanks to the ebb and flow of the tides, was staying there and warming in the summer sun. The engineer Joseph Bazalgette was given the task to build huge new sewers to intercept the waste, a vast network, so changing the look of London and helping ensure there were no further cholera outbreaks from contaminated water.
The image above is from Punch, July 10th 1858 and it has this caption: The 'Silent Highway'-Man. "Your Money or your Life!"
With
Rosemary Ashton
Emeritus Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London
Stephen Halliday
Author of ‘The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Metropolis’
And
Paul Dobraszczyk
Lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London