The Cholera Epidemic That Changed Britain Forever (History of Everything Podcast ep 127)



In the mid-1800s, London physician John Snow made a startling observation that would change the way that we view diseases and how they propagate. He created a map depicting where cases of cholera occurred in London’s West End and found them to be clustered around a water pump on Broad Street. This led him to believe that cholera was a waterborne disease, a conclusion that went against the Victorian “miasma theory” in which Londoners ascribed the source of cholera to bad airs or vapors entering the human body John Snow’s conviction about the source for the London outbreak and his concern for public health compelled him to oppose the popular beliefs of his time and convince the local council in London’s West End to disable the water pump on Broad Street.

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35 thoughts on “The Cholera Epidemic That Changed Britain Forever (History of Everything Podcast ep 127)”

  1. California legalized rainwater collection about a decade ago, but you have to follow water board regulations. The big issue here is similar to people in the Dakotas who found out they couldn't sell rights for shale oil, in that the homeowners often don't own the water/mineral rights to their properties.

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  2. as a GIS major who had a lot of classes that ended up being somebodies first brush with the topic – I had to hear the whole bit and the jokes 8 times for two full classes
    Nevertheless John Snow is a legend

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  3. They cover it a bit about rain water collection, where it IS restricted, it's not usually enforced at the residential level, unless people are being stupid jerks. It's a blanket code/law/regulation for MASS collection and/or retention. So if you're a member of the general public doing it on your own personal property, not in a city, you shouldn't be getting hastled, but if you're, for example, a farmer trying to retain water for your own crops, depleting the water shed for your own uses, basically obstructing other farmers "down" the watershed, you're breaking the law.

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  4. And yet our government has been selling our water rights in places like Arizona, drought prone places to other countries, for a ridiculously small sum. This is water from underground pockets that have been there for hundreds of years. The reason?, these countries have been forbidden to grow certain water intensive crops that would aid in increasing deserts growing. And yet we are giving them water from desert areas and limiting or restricting the citizens usage…all for a quick buck?

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  5. California's big concern with rainwater harvesting (though it is legal within reason since 2012) is that if left standing it contributes to the spread of insect-borne disease, if harvested commercially it prevents natural flow to farmland, and it presents some danger of pollutants and disease (when collected from roof runoff, which is encouraged for use in yards and gardens).

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  6. @16:17 the laws are old, based in the doctrine that rainwater is a public good and capturing it on your property might disrupt your downstream neighbor's supply. Modern revisions of the law allow for small collections, but still ban large scale rainwater harvest as it can genuinely have adverse impacts on groundwater flow depending on the area.

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  7. It's actually very rare for rainwater collection to be illegal, but the prepper/homesteader community has turned this into a horror story about how the government is trying to keep you from being self sufficient.
    In the places where it is illegal to collect rainwater it's usually because some farmer who owns thousands of acres with just the right geography built a large scale system that genuinely does deprive other people of water. Like, if you have a massive property on the side of a mountain that gets tons of rain and you build a series of swales and channels to divert the runoff into a reservoir everyone further down who used to get water doesn't anymore.

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  8. Colorado and Utah are dry so on a micro level storing water is detrimental to farms or ranches downstream. However we're also the watershed of a great portion of the nation. So on a macro level, we are obligated to allow water to run downstream to other states. We need permission of states downstream to retain any more water than we do.

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