People don’t realize how filthy water was before the 20th century. Rivers near London and Paris stank even back in the 17th century, well before industrialization:
In the 17th century, the English naturalist Martin Lister warned visitors to Paris that the city’s water caused “looseness, and sometimes dysenteries.” In London, the situation was also lamentable. For water, “the poor relied on the unsanitary and foul-smelling River Thames….The river water, teeming with bacteria, was a frequent cause of illness and untimely death, even in the 18th century. “Much of the water was taken from the River Thames, the receiving body of the city’s sewers. Terrible cholera outbreaks were quite common but shrugged off as an unpleasant fact of urban living.”…Filth flowed out windows, down the streets, and into the same streams, rivers, and lakes where the city’s inhabitants drew their water. As a result, cities stank to high heaven. This state of affairs only became worse as cities grew in population through the Middle Ages. As late as 1854, journalist George Goodwin graphically described London as a ‘cesspool city. The entire excrementation of the Metropolis shall sooner or later be mingled in the stream of the river, there to be rolled backward and forward around the population.’ The Thames grew so polluted in an 1858 episode, dubbed ‘The Great Stink’ by the Times, that the overpowering stench forced Parliament to adjourn until the odors subsided.”…
“In many cultures, the most effective strategy to avoid unsafe drinking water has been to avoid water altogether.” Almost everyone with the means to drink something besides water did so. “The drink of choice in [ancient] Egypt was beer, and in ancient Greece wine. It may not be surprising that one of the very first buildings constructed in Plymouth Plantation was a brewhouse.” Practically everywhere, people sought alternatives to unsafe water. “The fifth-century Hippocratic treatise ‘Airs, Waters, Places’ recommended adding wine to even the finest water. Beer was routinely added to water (called ‘small beer’) in the Middle Ages. Water was also commonly mixed with vinegar, ice, honey, parsley seed, and other spices. . . . After the discovery of the East Indies, mixing hot water with coffee and tea became popular” in the Western world as well.
…water was so despised throughout the preindustrial age that drinking it was sometimes considered a punishment. “In the time of Charlemagne, high-ranking military officers were punished for drunkenness by the humiliation of being forced to drink water…..among the Pilgrims of New England: “Drinking water—any water—was a sign of desperation, an admission of abject poverty, a last resort. Like all Europeans of the seventeenth century, the Pilgrims disliked, distrusted, and despised drinking water. Only truly poor people, who had absolutely no choice, drank water. There is one thing all Europeans agreed on: drinking water was bad—very bad—for your health.
Drinking water has gotten much cleaner in the last 50 years. So has the water people fish and swim in. Drinking water also grew cleaner from the 19th century to the 20th century.
