Bedside Manners 10: Dark Matter

for a long time been pretty contested. So to build a castle there was a move of confidence that didn't sit well with Ludwig. It didn't seem fair. As the story goes, the Emperor directed King Heinrich the sixth to call in his trusted advisers, counts and other nobles in order to convene at Saint Peter's Church in Erfurt, Germany, in July of eleven eighty four. He wanted mediation, and he wanted it fast. A judgment would be made on what to do about the land, and that would fully

be the end of the story. But of course it wasn't, but not for reasons that you might imagine as the sixty or so noblemen ambled into the church on that warm summer's day, the atmosphere was tense. There were politics and power at play, and those at the center of the dispute were being called in to explain themselves. The floorboards creaked and groaned as they shuffled in to face their boss. Everyone settled in and the king called the

meeting to order. But if anyone was worried about the boeing of the floor beneath their feet, they certainly didn't speak up. Within moments of kicking off the mediation, the floorboards splintered, cracked, and fell out from under them. Everyone standing there was pitched into the darkness below. But oh, if it were only just darkness, it would have been that much more simple. It wasn't. Instead of being dropped into, say, an open cellar, the sixty odd noblemen met with a

much worse fate. They had collapsed into the church's large communal latrine area. The latrine couldn't withstand the impact of their flying bodies, and with that the latrine area also collapsed in on itself, dropping their bodies down another level into the festering cesspool of feces. There was no way to quickly rescue the fallen. The unluckiest of folks drowned when their lungs filled with human waste or were asphyxiated

by a cloak of noxious fumes. By chance, the king, Archbishop Conrad the First and Langrave Ludwig the third survived. Evidently they had gone off into the church's side nook to have a private conversation just before the floor gave out, and since they were closer to the walls, they were able to hold onto the iron rails of the windows until their cries for help were answered. If the dispute they set out to resolve that day ever got settled, well,

that remains unclear. What's likely true is that the outcome of this meeting was something that they could never have anticipated. The latrine disaster remains a dark and squeamish moment in our history, but it's true. Everybody poops. Historically, this universal need has been experienced very differently, depending on the time, place, social class, and technology of the day. At the core of these differences, though, is a uniting truth. Sanitation and

hygiene are inextricably linked to our everyday health. It's not always as dramatic as it was that day in medieval Germany, but when poorly executed, the results have historically been positively deadly. I'm Aaron Mankee and welcome to bedside manners. It's hard to overstate how important poop is to humans. When we're born, we poop. After we die, our bowels often let go one last time, and in between those moments, the experience of relieving ourselves often functions as a barometer for health,

a litmus test of our bodies basic functionality. Poop offers important insights, but we've developed a squeamishness around this particular mundane event. The universal experience of emptying our bowels has long been met with silence and shame, embarrassment, and unease. Those who are too casually honest about their bathroom adventures might be given side eyes. We might scold our own kids for their bad language, accusing them of having a potty mouth. What goes down the loo is considered far

from polite conversation, but it wasn't always this way. The link between bowel contents and shame is a contemporary evolution. Life always follows poop in everything from oral tradition to scholastic analysis. Cultures across the world are home to origin stories, wherein land masses and life arises from the droppings of mythical creatures. Take one tail from the Chukchee people of Siberia, which describes the origin of the world resulting from a

creature known as the first Bird relieving itself. Solids became land, liquid became waterwys and if folklore tells us that the world arose from waste, some scholars believe that civilization itself could have risen from it. Excrement is chock full of nutrients that the soil and the critters living in it absolutely love, and as our early ancestors spread out from Africa, it's possible that they noticed that the places in which they stayed longer or revisited year after year seemed to

be extra fertile. It's possible that these rhythms of return gave way to farming and then to the rise of agrarian societies. But as humans settled down, their waste began to pile up in excess. This waste started to become a problem. It stank and crawled with vermin. It was clearly becoming a nuisance, and what was to be done with it became a long adventure that occupied many of our ancestors. The earliest communal restrooms can be traced in

Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC. Some scholars believe that trade routes gave rise to public rest stops, which, if you've ever been on a long road trip, is a welcome site. Because all early civilizations rose along water sources, depositing waste in waterways became a practical solution to a stinky problem. The Minoan civilization, which thrive between twenty six hundred and eleven hundred BC on Crete and the Islands, has been credited as the first to do this systematically.

In fact, they've been credited with building the world's first flushing toilets and underground waterways designed to carry their waste away. The ancient Romans, too were known for their waste disposal, but their strategizing came through utilizing cesspits, sewers, and basic street runoffs. They eventually built the Cloak of Maxima Latin for the greatest sewer around six hundred BC, which moved

millions of gallons of water per day. The wealthy constructed public latrines in marketplaces, not out of the goodness of their hearts, nor for the health of their slaves, but so that they wouldn't have to step in or see human waste across the world. In centuries later, in seventeenth century Osaka, Japan, shimogo collectors would travel across the city gathering what roughly translates in English to night soil. The words most literal translation shows up as fertilizer from the

bottom of a person. They were in the business of gathering human feces, bringing the waste den to the docks and loading it into the bellies of waiting sewage ships. From there, the boats would transport the human waste to farmers who would compost it and transform it into incredibly rich fertilizer. Those farmers then fed the urbanites. It was a beautiful, albeit smelly cycle without them. Without this cycle, Japan would have been a much hungrier place. Life beget

poop and poop beget life. But life doesn't always mean health. As history tells us, we know that toilets and what goes in them could be a profound source of illness. But although humans did their best to keep their waste out of sight, some lingering issues meant that it was never out of mind. In the summer of eighteen fifty eight, London, the largest and wealthiest city on earth at the time, had a problem. It had been an unseasonably hot, dry, and wildly unpleasant summer, so much so that it had

even won itself a nickname, the Great Stink. No one could escape the heavy blanket of stench. Fueled by the putrid state of the River Thames and the crumbling state of London sewer system. The populations in areas surrounding the River Thames were rapidly expanding, more than doubling between eighteen

hundred and eighteen fifty. The river had long served as an out of sight, out of mind solution for what to do with human waste for centuries, people depositing their waste in it and assuming the current would just take it all far far away. This was all compounded by a relatively new invention that was beginning to work its way into homes of wealthy Londoners, and which was later described by some as the most life saving invention of

all time, the flushable toilet enclosed in water closets. The water closets, which were just toilets enclosed in small rooms discharged far more liquid into the cesspools than the average chamber pot. And as this innovation became more and more popular and people began installing more of them in their homes, the household cesspools began to fully saturate and overflow. Soon the streets were being flooded by these cesspools, spreading stench, vermin,

and disease. As for the poor River Thames and all the people it served, the unusually hot summer had caused her to dry up more than usual. What was revealed in the lower water line were festering masses of hot baking waste, and a time before germ theory became popularized, it was believed that most diseases were borne by miasma, or the lethal vapors given off by decaying organic matter. It's reported that those who went too close to the

Thames suffered from fainting spells and seizure fits. Some would vomit. One legend reports that a woman tried to end her life by jumping into the river, but was first knocked unconscious by its fumes. The government attempted to neutralize this problem by dumping chalk lime, chloride of lime and carbolic acid into the river, but efforts fell short. Sanitary conditions had reached epically bad proportions, and the problem, of course,

was worse than just the smell. You see, London had suffered a series of cholera outbreaks, and at that point it was believed that cholera was contracted by inhaling bad air. With this logic, it was assumed that the foul River Thames was a health hazard, and it was The Thames was likely to blame for a lot of the city's illnesses, but not for the reasons that Londoners thought. It turns

out that cholera wasn't airborne, but it was wasteborn. Toilets were becoming more popular and moving beyond the ranks of the financial elites. More sewage was being dumped into the River Thames day by day, even though it was often the main water supply that people used in their homes. It was bathing water, it was drinking water. It took four decades before new, more appropriate drainage systems were engineered

and fully implemented. Toilets were beginning to catch on across the world through the nineteenth century and cities were struggling to keep up. Across the pond, another public sanitation crisis was brewing. This one, though, it'd be the impetus behind one of the greatest marvels of engineering in recent history. Those who developed Chicago only had to look to Europe to see what happens when a city grows too large, too quickly. In eighteen fifty, Chicago's population was nearly thirty

thousand by eighteen fifty three. Just three years later, it had doubled. In eighteen fifty four, a cholera outbreak killed six percent of the city's population, and leaders knew that they had to do something drastic. They knew that illness was linked to waste, and it just seemed that waste was everywhere. So when the city appointed its Board of Sewage Commissioners in eighteen fifty five, they tasked engineer Ellis

Sylvester Chessboro to do what seemed impossible. No city in America had a sewage system, and they wanted him to create the first one. After striking out on a handful of ideas, he ultimately settled on the final plan. The city would need to drain the sewage into the river, which would then be drained into Lake Michigan, diluting the sewage and dispersing what they believed to be the disease ridden stench. But first, in order to do this, he

would need to raise the city. Chicago was roughly sea level, and he needed it to be higher. At its highest point, the city sat only about five feet above the surrounding waterways, and the success of Ellis's solution was predicated on his ability to get gravity to work for him. Starting the next year and carrying on for the next twenty, Chicago raised its city streets anywhere from two to fourteen feet. The new streets looked like ramps and were often level

with the second story of some homes. Many of those ground floors even became cellars, and this worked according to Ellis's plan. Things seemed to be draining as they should, but the lake still supplied the city's drinking water, and it became evident that widespread contamination was still only a matter of time. In the back of his mind, he knew this. He knew the choice was a flawed one, but he thought it was the best one he could could make given the information that he had available to

him at the time. As a more permanent solution for handling the waste from the booming city, Ellis proposed something much more dramatic, something unheard of. He wanted to reverse the direction of the Chicago River entirely, sending it backward away from Lake Michigan and into the Mississippi. He identified a subcontinental divide just west of the city. He believed if they could only dig a small, deep canal through it, then gravity would do its job and carry the water away.

This idea, of course, seemed to be marvelous and to some extent entirely short sighted. It would be a feat of engineering, but not necessarily of sanitation. They were worried about miasma's stench and hadn't come to understand that the pathogens were in fact waterborn. It just sent the problem to their neighbors downstream. Chicago claimed that the solution was dilution,

but downriver Saint Louis, Missouri didn't buy it. So while the city explored its legal options, the citizens of Chicago clamored for their clean water at last, after many years of delays, On September third of eighteen ninety two, thousands of diggers got to work. They brought their shovels, horses, wagons, and dynamite to carve a new pathway for the river. In all, they excavated more than forty two million cubic yards of rock and soil to the tune of twenty

eight miles. On January Tewod of nineteen hundred, quietly and under the cover of night, a few canal commissioners, their wives, and a small number of reporters broke the final dam connecting the canal to the des Plains River, which then linked up with the Mississippi and then finally flowed out into the Gulf of Mexico. And it worked. After a few days time, the Chicago Record reported the river to be turning blue. Some even noted the clear colored ice

that flowed by backwards. The citizens of Chicago would stop to stare in amazement at what had taken place in their city and to their water, And as they did, they hoped for brighter and healthier days ahead. Keeping ourselves free from waste and disease has driven us to major technological undertakings. In the case of re routing the Chicago River, more earth was moved in that effort than ever before

in human history. The machines used for excavation developed and used in Chicago would eventually help dig the Panama Canal just a few years later. For the city's efforts, their problem of the build up of raw sewage and industrial waste contaminating their city's water was solved as the construction continued. In years to follow, new extensions of the canal were also built, but of course this problem merely shifted. Those downstream were less happy, and a host of environmental issues

developed as a result. Saint Louis continued its crusade, but the city of Chicago denied its culpability. In the first pollution case ever brought before the Supreme Court, Chicago defended itself by pointing its finger at these several other cities closer to Saint Louis that were discharging their waste into their waterways. It was determined that Saint Louis had no recourse and ended up building a filtration system for the incoming water. Others were concerned with the diversion of fresh

water away from Lake Michigan and its surrounding areas. The Supreme Court ruled that locks and gates had to be installed to help control this process, but according to one report, over twenty three thousand gallons of fresh water are still diverted downstream every second. The influx of water into the Mississippi has caused a host of other environmental disasters. It flooded farmland, introduced invasive species, created uninhabitable environments, and brought

pollution all the way to the Gulf. But it's not just Chicago, and it's not just the Mississippi River. Even today, cities across the world still pump their wastewater untreated into their waterways. Sometimes it's on purpose, other times these sewer systems fail due to watery weather events. We now have a better idea of how to manage wasteborn illnesses. We teach small children to wash their hands and shudder when we notice some one walking out of a public restroom

without doing so. But around the world, sanitation measures and their failings are still responsible for the spread of disease and death. The Centers for Disease Control released a study in twenty twenty finding that two point three billion people lacked basic hygiene services and one point six billion people had access to hand washing facilities that lacked water or soap.

They went on to estimate that if everyone had appropriate resources, access and education about hand washing, one million deaths could be prevented each year. So don't forget to soap up after all, clean hands save lives for something that's such a benign act of the every day. It's fascinating to know that relieving oneself has such a dynamic and complicated history.

Stick around through this brief sponsor break, and my teammate Robin Minitter will tell you one more story about the invisible, everyday world of newer systems.

city streets. On February ninth, nineteen thirty five, The New York Times published a headline that read, alligator found an uptown sewer. As the story went, a group of teenage boys were shoveling snow down a sewer drain when one yelled in excitement he had seen movement and told his friends what he spotted was in fact, an alligator. The story then goes on to report that they lasted the creature with the clothes line, hauled it out, and beat

it with their shovels. At one hundred and twenty five pounds and eight feet long, it was also now very bare ver dead. Stories of city sewer gators can be traced back to the early nineteen twenties. To sell copies and turn a profit, it wasn't uncommon for newspapers to publish hoaxes the original fake news if he will. Famously, The New York Sun ran an entire series about creatures on the Moon shock full of fake interviews and everything. But in the case of the boy's unfortunate at gaiter,

there was a kernel of truth to be had. Their creature was indeed real, and upon further investigation, it seems that the gater had hitched a ride aboard a ship coming up from Florida and accidentally gotten itself flopped into the East River. Sewer inspectors themselves first reported seeing gaiters below the streets in nineteen thirty five, the Commissioner of New York City tenny May believed that these men were just drinking on the job, but he went down for himself,

and he was shocked of what he found. His flashlight showed gaiters, indeed, averaging about two feet in length. So he set out on a campaign to rid the sewers of them, and hired men with twenty two caliber rifles to do it. Years later, he announced that they had all been exterminated, at least the alligators underground, but the alligators kept popping up. They were found north of Manhattan in Westchester County, and on a subway platform in Brooklyn.

A barge captain even pulled a five footer out of the East River in nineteen thirty seven and reportedly decided to keep it as a pet. It was reported that the Bronx River was swarming with them. An authority set out to capture them for an installation at the zoo. But where did all of these gators come from? You

might ask? Well, before Amazon took over, we used to order a lot of things from the back pages of all kinds of magazines, and in the backs of the magazines aimed at young boys pistoled all kinds of stuff, practical jokes, card games, and even baby alligators. For one fifty at pop you could have your very own baby dinosaur ship to you right through the US Postal Service. It was a brisk business in those days, especially for

the kids whose parents wouldn't get them a dog. And I'm sure that there were many parents who, upon meeting their new room rate we usually had just gotten their kid at puppy and then probably made their kid flush their new friends down the drain.

and Matt Frederick. You can learn more about this show, the Grimm and Mild team and all the other podcasts that we make over at Grimandmild dot com, and as always, thanks for listening