A History of Urban Poop

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Dealing with human wastes was a huge problem in cities at the beginning of the 19th century. The ways in which sewage and sanitation were handled (or not) often led to large-scale outbreaks of disease that killed thousands of people every year, and sometimes even more bizarre and spectacular disasters like the Great Stink of London (1858) or the infamous SS Princess Alice sinking. By 1920, though, at least in North America and Western Europe, huge strides had been made to alleviate the poop problem. This video traces the development of sanitation technology and practices, the thinking that made them possible, and the stories of some of the people prominent in the history of urban poop. It’s a smelly episode of environmental history, but may be more interesting than you might have thought at first!

Minor correction: at 38:55, I mention that the Palace of Westminster was completed in 1840; actually it was begun in that year (minor construction continued for many years after that).

Sources for this video include Martin V. Melosi, The Sanitary City (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008); Jamie Benidickson, The Culture of Flushing: A Social & Legal History of Sewage (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007); William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1991); Stephen Halliday, The Great Stink of London (Cheltenham, UK: The History Press, 2023 ed.); Stephen Halliday, “Death and Miasma in Victorian London: An Obstinate Belief,” BMJ: British Medical Journal, Vol. 323, No. 7327 (December 2001), 1469, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25468628; Kathryn S. Meier, “‘No Place for the Sick’: Nature’s War on Civil War Soldier Mental & Physical Health in the 1862 Peninsula and Shenandoah Valley Campaigns,” Journal of the Civil War Era, Vol. 1, No. 2 (June 2011), 176, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26070113; May Stone, “The Plumbing Paradox: American Attitudes Toward Late 19th Century Domestic Sanitary Arrangements,” Winterthur Portfolio, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Autumn 1979), 283, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1180661; and Joel Tarr, James McCurley, Francis McMichael & Terry Yosie, “Water and Wastes: A Retrospective Assessment of Wastewater Technology in the United States, 1800-1932,” Technology and Culture, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Apr. 1984), 226, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3104713.

Special thanks to Austin Pierce.

Access to sanitation and toilets is still a major problem for a huge segment of the human population. The World Toilet Organization is working on that. Their website: https://worldtoilet.org/

My website: https://www.seanmunger.com
My Ko-fi: https://Ko-fi.com/seanmunger
My blog: https://gardenofmemory.net/

Chapters:
00:00-11:12: A Tale of Two Poos
11:12-25:18: Miasma
25:18-36:57: The Toilet Revolution
36:57-47:40: The Great Stink
47:40-1:05:51: Out of the Muck
1:05:51-1:15:03: Ladies and Germs
1:15:03-1:29:32: Blundering Toward Cleanliness
1:29:32-1:39:53: The Great Aerators
1:39:53-1:50:57: What Happened to Everyone & Conclusion

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25 thoughts on “A History of Urban Poop”

  5. Get video but news flash ; Germ theory, water born illness and sanitation actually was written in the oldest parts of bible 3500 years ago. Somehow the world missed it but it's all there.

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  7. Your videos are incredibly fascinating and entertaining and I, for one, am absolutely here to listen to you talk shit for 2 hours! Thanks for all of the effort you put into your videos and deep dives!

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  9. Awesome and very educational video. I for one never give the history of sanitation (here meaning urban poop) a thought, I just take it for granted here (northern europe). Travelling to different parts of asia however, thats a hole other story 😮 Thanks for another very interesting video, keep them coming 😊. Happy Newyear 🎉 and Greetings from 😊 Denmark 🎉

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  15. Why would this topic be “deadly dull” 6:24? I think it’s really interesting (without having watched the rest of the video yet) and yet almost no one covers it—it’s something we should know more about. It obviously represents a major advance in technology, infrastructure, and, very importantly, public health. (My dad, an engineer, used to say that the state of a place’s technology for dealing with human waste was an indicator of that society’s level of civilization—I’m not so sure I’d go that far but I get his point.)

    On a related topic: I was under the impression that, two hundred years before, 17th-century Tokyo was extremely clean, as compared to Western Europe of the time, which says something about the state of its sewage and sanitation systems at the time. How true is that?

    Edit: Having now watched the video, I thought it was really fascinating! These advances should be celebrated and as well-known as, if not better-known than, other achievements—bridges, canals, railroads, communications. They’ve saved countless lives and spared millions from innumerable diseases.

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  24. Sean, I would love to see you take an interest in, and do a deep dive on, findings by the TIGHAR [The International Group r.e. Historic Aircraft Recovery] group on finding considerable archeological evidence of Earhart and Noonan landing on Gardner Island [Nikumaroro] and subsisting there for a time before they finally met their demise. They sent distress signals from the plane, which were heard but not understood as coming from them, before the plane subsided into the surf. Interested? It's easy to find their website and you can judge their veracity for yourself. I get so tired of speculative ideas about what happened to them, when TIGHAR has done meticulous research and found verifiable evidence.

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  25. John Snow is also considered a pioneer of GIS by geography because he mapped the infection which is how he came to focus on the Broad Street pump. It is a core tenet of geography that everything is related, but things that are closer together are more related.

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