flying toilets
In Monday's post I mentioned how much I loved London when I visited - but London wasn't always such an appealing place. During the Industrial Revolution, it was filthy and polluted. The stench was appalling, and an episode of particularly foul smells from the Thames River in 1858 was known as the "Great Stink." Life expectancy in England's urban areas was markedly lower than in the countryside.
This filthy environment was the site of a public health breakthrough. During the 1854 cholera epidemic in London, the physician John Snow mapped the cholera cases from an outbreak in the Soho district…