Speaker 1: The Emperor hoped to end the squabbling once and for all.
Speaker 1: Ludwig the Third, a landholding count, and Archbishop Conrad the
Speaker 1: First were locked in a feud. You see, Conrad wasn't
Speaker 1: being a good neighbor. At least that's what Ludwig thought.
Speaker 1: Conrad had started building a castle near Ludwig's territory, and
Speaker 1: it all seemed a little aggressive to Ludwig. It seemed
Speaker 1: that Conrad was staking a claim in a space that
Speaker 1: wasn't exactly his. In fact, the territory was and had
Speaker 1: for a long time been pretty contested. So to build
Speaker 1: a castle there was a move of confidence that didn't
Speaker 1: sit well with Ludwig. It didn't seem fair. As the
Speaker 1: story goes, the Emperor directed King Heinrich the sixth to
Speaker 1: call in his trusted advisers, counts and other nobles in
Speaker 1: order to convene at Saint Peter's Church in Erfurt, Germany,
Speaker 1: in July of eleven eighty four. He wanted mediation, and
Speaker 1: he wanted it fast. A judgment would be made on
Speaker 1: what to do about the land, and that would fully
Speaker 1: be the end of the story. But of course it wasn't,
Speaker 1: but not for reasons that you might imagine as the
Speaker 1: sixty or so noblemen ambled into the church on that
Speaker 1: warm summer's day, the atmosphere was tense. There were politics
Speaker 1: and power at play, and those at the center of
Speaker 1: the dispute were being called in to explain themselves. The
Speaker 1: floorboards creaked and groaned as they shuffled in to face
Speaker 1: their boss. Everyone settled in and the king called the
Speaker 1: meeting to order. But if anyone was worried about the
Speaker 1: boeing of the floor beneath their feet, they certainly didn't
Speaker 1: speak up. Within moments of kicking off the mediation, the
Speaker 1: floorboards splintered, cracked, and fell out from under them. Everyone
Speaker 1: standing there was pitched into the darkness below. But oh,
Speaker 1: if it were only just darkness, it would have been
Speaker 1: that much more simple. It wasn't. Instead of being dropped into, say,
Speaker 1: an open cellar, the sixty odd noblemen met with a
Speaker 1: much worse fate. They had collapsed into the church's large
Speaker 1: communal latrine area. The latrine couldn't withstand the impact of
Speaker 1: their flying bodies, and with that the latrine area also
Speaker 1: collapsed in on itself, dropping their bodies down another level
Speaker 1: into the festering cesspool of feces. There was no way
Speaker 1: to quickly rescue the fallen. The unluckiest of folks drowned
Speaker 1: when their lungs filled with human waste or were asphyxiated
Speaker 1: by a cloak of noxious fumes. By chance, the king,
Speaker 1: Archbishop Conrad the First and Langrave Ludwig the third survived.
Speaker 1: Evidently they had gone off into the church's side nook
Speaker 1: to have a private conversation just before the floor gave out,
Speaker 1: and since they were closer to the walls, they were
Speaker 1: able to hold onto the iron rails of the windows
Speaker 1: until their cries for help were answered. If the dispute
Speaker 1: they set out to resolve that day ever got settled, well,
Speaker 1: that remains unclear. What's likely true is that the outcome
Speaker 1: of this meeting was something that they could never have anticipated.
Speaker 1: The latrine disaster remains a dark and squeamish moment in
Speaker 1: our history, but it's true. Everybody poops. Historically, this universal
Speaker 1: need has been experienced very differently, depending on the time, place,
Speaker 1: social class, and technology of the day. At the core
Speaker 1: of these differences, though, is a uniting truth. Sanitation and
Speaker 1: hygiene are inextricably linked to our everyday health. It's not
Speaker 1: always as dramatic as it was that day in medieval Germany,
Speaker 1: but when poorly executed, the results have historically been positively deadly.
Speaker 1: I'm Aaron Mankee and welcome to bedside manners. It's hard
Speaker 1: to overstate how important poop is to humans. When we're born,
Speaker 1: we poop. After we die, our bowels often let go
Speaker 1: one last time, and in between those moments, the experience
Speaker 1: of relieving ourselves often functions as a barometer for health,
Speaker 1: a litmus test of our bodies basic functionality. Poop offers
Speaker 1: important insights, but we've developed a squeamishness around this particular
Speaker 1: mundane event. The universal experience of emptying our bowels has
Speaker 1: long been met with silence and shame, embarrassment, and unease.
Speaker 1: Those who are too casually honest about their bathroom adventures
Speaker 1: might be given side eyes. We might scold our own
Speaker 1: kids for their bad language, accusing them of having a
Speaker 1: potty mouth. What goes down the loo is considered far
Speaker 1: from polite conversation, but it wasn't always this way. The
Speaker 1: link between bowel contents and shame is a contemporary evolution.
Speaker 1: Life always follows poop in everything from oral tradition to
Speaker 1: scholastic analysis. Cultures across the world are home to origin stories,
Speaker 1: wherein land masses and life arises from the droppings of
Speaker 1: mythical creatures. Take one tail from the Chukchee people of Siberia,
Speaker 1: which describes the origin of the world resulting from a
Speaker 1: creature known as the first Bird relieving itself. Solids became land,
Speaker 1: liquid became waterwys and if folklore tells us that the
Speaker 1: world arose from waste, some scholars believe that civilization itself
Speaker 1: could have risen from it. Excrement is chock full of
Speaker 1: nutrients that the soil and the critters living in it
Speaker 1: absolutely love, and as our early ancestors spread out from Africa,
Speaker 1: it's possible that they noticed that the places in which
Speaker 1: they stayed longer or revisited year after year seemed to
Speaker 1: be extra fertile. It's possible that these rhythms of return
Speaker 1: gave way to farming and then to the rise of
Speaker 1: agrarian societies. But as humans settled down, their waste began
Speaker 1: to pile up in excess. This waste started to become
Speaker 1: a problem. It stank and crawled with vermin. It was
Speaker 1: clearly becoming a nuisance, and what was to be done
Speaker 1: with it became a long adventure that occupied many of
Speaker 1: our ancestors. The earliest communal restrooms can be traced in
Speaker 1: Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC. Some scholars believe that
Speaker 1: trade routes gave rise to public rest stops, which, if
Speaker 1: you've ever been on a long road trip, is a
Speaker 1: welcome site. Because all early civilizations rose along water sources,
Speaker 1: depositing waste in waterways became a practical solution to a
Speaker 1: stinky problem. The Minoan civilization, which thrive between twenty six
Speaker 1: hundred and eleven hundred BC on Crete and the Islands,
Speaker 1: has been credited as the first to do this systematically.
Speaker 1: In fact, they've been credited with building the world's first
Speaker 1: flushing toilets and underground waterways designed to carry their waste away.
Speaker 1: The ancient Romans, too were known for their waste disposal,
Speaker 1: but their strategizing came through utilizing cesspits, sewers, and basic
Speaker 1: street runoffs. They eventually built the Cloak of Maxima Latin
Speaker 1: for the greatest sewer around six hundred BC, which moved
Speaker 1: millions of gallons of water per day. The wealthy constructed
Speaker 1: public latrines in marketplaces, not out of the goodness of
Speaker 1: their hearts, nor for the health of their slaves, but
Speaker 1: so that they wouldn't have to step in or see
Speaker 1: human waste across the world. In centuries later, in seventeenth
Speaker 1: century Osaka, Japan, shimogo collectors would travel across the city
Speaker 1: gathering what roughly translates in English to night soil. The
Speaker 1: words most literal translation shows up as fertilizer from the
Speaker 1: bottom of a person. They were in the business of
Speaker 1: gathering human feces, bringing the waste den to the docks
Speaker 1: and loading it into the bellies of waiting sewage ships.
Speaker 1: From there, the boats would transport the human waste to
Speaker 1: farmers who would compost it and transform it into incredibly
Speaker 1: rich fertilizer. Those farmers then fed the urbanites. It was
Speaker 1: a beautiful, albeit smelly cycle without them. Without this cycle,
Speaker 1: Japan would have been a much hungrier place. Life beget
Speaker 1: poop and poop beget life. But life doesn't always mean health.
Speaker 1: As history tells us, we know that toilets and what
Speaker 1: goes in them could be a profound source of illness.
Speaker 1: But although humans did their best to keep their waste
Speaker 1: out of sight, some lingering issues meant that it was
Speaker 1: never out of mind. In the summer of eighteen fifty eight, London,
Speaker 1: the largest and wealthiest city on earth at the time,
Speaker 1: had a problem. It had been an unseasonably hot, dry,
Speaker 1: and wildly unpleasant summer, so much so that it had
Speaker 1: even won itself a nickname, the Great Stink. No one
Speaker 1: could escape the heavy blanket of stench. Fueled by the
Speaker 1: putrid state of the River Thames and the crumbling state
Speaker 1: of London sewer system. The populations in areas surrounding the
Speaker 1: River Thames were rapidly expanding, more than doubling between eighteen
Speaker 1: hundred and eighteen fifty. The river had long served as
Speaker 1: an out of sight, out of mind solution for what
Speaker 1: to do with human waste for centuries, people depositing their
Speaker 1: waste in it and assuming the current would just take
Speaker 1: it all far far away. This was all compounded by
Speaker 1: a relatively new invention that was beginning to work its
Speaker 1: way into homes of wealthy Londoners, and which was later
Speaker 1: described by some as the most life saving invention of
Speaker 1: all time, the flushable toilet enclosed in water closets. The
Speaker 1: water closets, which were just toilets enclosed in small rooms
Speaker 1: discharged far more liquid into the cesspools than the average
Speaker 1: chamber pot. And as this innovation became more and more
Speaker 1: popular and people began installing more of them in their homes,
Speaker 1: the household cesspools began to fully saturate and overflow. Soon
Speaker 1: the streets were being flooded by these cesspools, spreading stench, vermin,
Speaker 1: and disease. As for the poor River Thames and all
Speaker 1: the people it served, the unusually hot summer had caused
Speaker 1: her to dry up more than usual. What was revealed
Speaker 1: in the lower water line were festering masses of hot
Speaker 1: baking waste, and a time before germ theory became popularized,
Speaker 1: it was believed that most diseases were borne by miasma,
Speaker 1: or the lethal vapors given off by decaying organic matter.
Speaker 1: It's reported that those who went too close to the
Speaker 1: Thames suffered from fainting spells and seizure fits. Some would vomit.
Speaker 1: One legend reports that a woman tried to end her
Speaker 1: life by jumping into the river, but was first knocked
Speaker 1: unconscious by its fumes. The government attempted to neutralize this
Speaker 1: problem by dumping chalk lime, chloride of lime and carbolic
Speaker 1: acid into the river, but efforts fell short. Sanitary conditions
Speaker 1: had reached epically bad proportions, and the problem, of course,
Speaker 1: was worse than just the smell. You see, London had
Speaker 1: suffered a series of cholera outbreaks, and at that point
Speaker 1: it was believed that cholera was contracted by inhaling bad air.
Speaker 1: With this logic, it was assumed that the foul River
Speaker 1: Thames was a health hazard, and it was The Thames
Speaker 1: was likely to blame for a lot of the city's illnesses,
Speaker 1: but not for the reasons that Londoners thought. It turns
Speaker 1: out that cholera wasn't airborne, but it was wasteborn. Toilets
Speaker 1: were becoming more popular and moving beyond the ranks of
Speaker 1: the financial elites. More sewage was being dumped into the
Speaker 1: River Thames day by day, even though it was often
Speaker 1: the main water supply that people used in their homes.
Speaker 1: It was bathing water, it was drinking water. It took
Speaker 1: four decades before new, more appropriate drainage systems were engineered
Speaker 1: and fully implemented. Toilets were beginning to catch on across
Speaker 1: the world through the nineteenth century and cities were struggling
Speaker 1: to keep up. Across the pond, another public sanitation crisis
Speaker 1: was brewing. This one, though, it'd be the impetus behind
Speaker 1: one of the greatest marvels of engineering in recent history.
Speaker 1: Those who developed Chicago only had to look to Europe
Speaker 1: to see what happens when a city grows too large,
Speaker 1: too quickly. In eighteen fifty, Chicago's population was nearly thirty
Speaker 1: thousand by eighteen fifty three. Just three years later, it
Speaker 1: had doubled. In eighteen fifty four, a cholera outbreak killed
Speaker 1: six percent of the city's population, and leaders knew that
Speaker 1: they had to do something drastic. They knew that illness
Speaker 1: was linked to waste, and it just seemed that waste
Speaker 1: was everywhere. So when the city appointed its Board of
Speaker 1: Sewage Commissioners in eighteen fifty five, they tasked engineer Ellis
Speaker 1: Sylvester Chessboro to do what seemed impossible. No city in
Speaker 1: America had a sewage system, and they wanted him to
Speaker 1: create the first one. After striking out on a handful
Speaker 1: of ideas, he ultimately settled on the final plan. The
Speaker 1: city would need to drain the sewage into the river,
Speaker 1: which would then be drained into Lake Michigan, diluting the
Speaker 1: sewage and dispersing what they believed to be the disease
Speaker 1: ridden stench. But first, in order to do this, he
Speaker 1: would need to raise the city. Chicago was roughly sea level,
Speaker 1: and he needed it to be higher. At its highest point,
Speaker 1: the city sat only about five feet above the surrounding waterways,
Speaker 1: and the success of Ellis's solution was predicated on his
Speaker 1: ability to get gravity to work for him. Starting the
Speaker 1: next year and carrying on for the next twenty, Chicago
Speaker 1: raised its city streets anywhere from two to fourteen feet.
Speaker 1: The new streets looked like ramps and were often level
Speaker 1: with the second story of some homes. Many of those
Speaker 1: ground floors even became cellars, and this worked according to
Speaker 1: Ellis's plan. Things seemed to be draining as they should,
Speaker 1: but the lake still supplied the city's drinking water, and
Speaker 1: it became evident that widespread contamination was still only a
Speaker 1: matter of time. In the back of his mind, he
Speaker 1: knew this. He knew the choice was a flawed one,
Speaker 1: but he thought it was the best one he could
Speaker 1: could make given the information that he had available to
Speaker 1: him at the time. As a more permanent solution for
Speaker 1: handling the waste from the booming city, Ellis proposed something
Speaker 1: much more dramatic, something unheard of. He wanted to reverse
Speaker 1: the direction of the Chicago River entirely, sending it backward
Speaker 1: away from Lake Michigan and into the Mississippi. He identified
Speaker 1: a subcontinental divide just west of the city. He believed
Speaker 1: if they could only dig a small, deep canal through it,
Speaker 1: then gravity would do its job and carry the water away.
Speaker 1: This idea, of course, seemed to be marvelous and to
Speaker 1: some extent entirely short sighted. It would be a feat
Speaker 1: of engineering, but not necessarily of sanitation. They were worried
Speaker 1: about miasma's stench and hadn't come to understand that the
Speaker 1: pathogens were in fact waterborn. It just sent the problem
Speaker 1: to their neighbors downstream. Chicago claimed that the solution was dilution,
Speaker 1: but downriver Saint Louis, Missouri didn't buy it. So while
Speaker 1: the city explored its legal options, the citizens of Chicago
Speaker 1: clamored for their clean water at last, after many years
Speaker 1: of delays, On September third of eighteen ninety two, thousands
Speaker 1: of diggers got to work. They brought their shovels, horses, wagons,
Speaker 1: and dynamite to carve a new pathway for the river.
Speaker 1: In all, they excavated more than forty two million cubic
Speaker 1: yards of rock and soil to the tune of twenty
Speaker 1: eight miles. On January Tewod of nineteen hundred, quietly and
Speaker 1: under the cover of night, a few canal commissioners, their wives,
Speaker 1: and a small number of reporters broke the final dam
Speaker 1: connecting the canal to the des Plains River, which then
Speaker 1: linked up with the Mississippi and then finally flowed out
Speaker 1: into the Gulf of Mexico. And it worked. After a
Speaker 1: few days time, the Chicago Record reported the river to
Speaker 1: be turning blue. Some even noted the clear colored ice
Speaker 1: that flowed by backwards. The citizens of Chicago would stop
Speaker 1: to stare in amazement at what had taken place in
Speaker 1: their city and to their water, And as they did,
Speaker 1: they hoped for brighter and healthier days ahead. Keeping ourselves
Speaker 1: free from waste and disease has driven us to major
Speaker 1: technological undertakings. In the case of re routing the Chicago River,
Speaker 1: more earth was moved in that effort than ever before
Speaker 1: in human history. The machines used for excavation developed and
Speaker 1: used in Chicago would eventually help dig the Panama Canal
Speaker 1: just a few years later. For the city's efforts, their
Speaker 1: problem of the build up of raw sewage and industrial
Speaker 1: waste contaminating their city's water was solved as the construction continued.
Speaker 1: In years to follow, new extensions of the canal were
Speaker 1: also built, but of course this problem merely shifted. Those
Speaker 1: downstream were less happy, and a host of environmental issues
Speaker 1: developed as a result. Saint Louis continued its crusade, but
Speaker 1: the city of Chicago denied its culpability. In the first
Speaker 1: pollution case ever brought before the Supreme Court, Chicago defended
Speaker 1: itself by pointing its finger at these several other cities
Speaker 1: closer to Saint Louis that were discharging their waste into
Speaker 1: their waterways. It was determined that Saint Louis had no
Speaker 1: recourse and ended up building a filtration system for the
Speaker 1: incoming water. Others were concerned with the diversion of fresh
Speaker 1: water away from Lake Michigan and its surrounding areas. The
Speaker 1: Supreme Court ruled that locks and gates had to be
Speaker 1: installed to help control this process, but according to one report,
Speaker 1: over twenty three thousand gallons of fresh water are still
Speaker 1: diverted downstream every second. The influx of water into the
Speaker 1: Mississippi has caused a host of other environmental disasters. It
Speaker 1: flooded farmland, introduced invasive species, created uninhabitable environments, and brought
Speaker 1: pollution all the way to the Gulf. But it's not
Speaker 1: just Chicago, and it's not just the Mississippi River. Even today,
Speaker 1: cities across the world still pump their wastewater untreated into
Speaker 1: their waterways. Sometimes it's on purpose, other times these sewer
Speaker 1: systems fail due to watery weather events. We now have
Speaker 1: a better idea of how to manage wasteborn illnesses. We
Speaker 1: teach small children to wash their hands and shudder when
Speaker 1: we notice some one walking out of a public restroom
Speaker 1: without doing so. But around the world, sanitation measures and
Speaker 1: their failings are still responsible for the spread of disease
Speaker 1: and death. The Centers for Disease Control released a study
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty finding that two point three billion people
Speaker 1: lacked basic hygiene services and one point six billion people
Speaker 1: had access to hand washing facilities that lacked water or soap.
Speaker 1: They went on to estimate that if everyone had appropriate resources,
Speaker 1: access and education about hand washing, one million deaths could
Speaker 1: be prevented each year. So don't forget to soap up
Speaker 1: after all, clean hands save lives for something that's such
Speaker 1: a benign act of the every day. It's fascinating to
Speaker 1: know that relieving oneself has such a dynamic and complicated history.
Speaker 1: Stick around through this brief sponsor break, and my teammate
Speaker 1: Robin Minitter will tell you one more story about the invisible,
Speaker 1: everyday world of newer systems.
Speaker 2: Almost eight and a half million people call New York
Speaker 2: City home, and you can find just about anything there,
Speaker 2: and with that kind of density there are always bound
Speaker 2: to be some surprises. In twenty ten, an alligator was
Speaker 2: spotted in the streets and naturally caused a bit of
Speaker 2: a stir, but it probably didn't cause a lot of shock.
Speaker 2: After all, if you've spent any time there, you've definitely
Speaker 2: heard about the legends of gators hanging out below the
Speaker 2: city streets. On February ninth, nineteen thirty five, The New
Speaker 2: York Times published a headline that read, alligator found an
Speaker 2: uptown sewer. As the story went, a group of teenage
Speaker 2: boys were shoveling snow down a sewer drain when one
Speaker 2: yelled in excitement he had seen movement and told his
Speaker 2: friends what he spotted was in fact, an alligator. The
Speaker 2: story then goes on to report that they lasted the
Speaker 2: creature with the clothes line, hauled it out, and beat
Speaker 2: it with their shovels. At one hundred and twenty five
Speaker 2: pounds and eight feet long, it was also now very
Speaker 2: bare ver dead. Stories of city sewer gators can be
Speaker 2: traced back to the early nineteen twenties. To sell copies
Speaker 2: and turn a profit, it wasn't uncommon for newspapers to
Speaker 2: publish hoaxes the original fake news if he will. Famously,
Speaker 2: The New York Sun ran an entire series about creatures
Speaker 2: on the Moon shock full of fake interviews and everything.
Speaker 2: But in the case of the boy's unfortunate at gaiter,
Speaker 2: there was a kernel of truth to be had. Their
Speaker 2: creature was indeed real, and upon further investigation, it seems
Speaker 2: that the gater had hitched a ride aboard a ship
Speaker 2: coming up from Florida and accidentally gotten itself flopped into
Speaker 2: the East River. Sewer inspectors themselves first reported seeing gaiters
Speaker 2: below the streets in nineteen thirty five, the Commissioner of
Speaker 2: New York City tenny May believed that these men were
Speaker 2: just drinking on the job, but he went down for himself,
Speaker 2: and he was shocked of what he found. His flashlight
Speaker 2: showed gaiters, indeed, averaging about two feet in length. So
Speaker 2: he set out on a campaign to rid the sewers
Speaker 2: of them, and hired men with twenty two caliber rifles
Speaker 2: to do it. Years later, he announced that they had
Speaker 2: all been exterminated, at least the alligators underground, but the
Speaker 2: alligators kept popping up. They were found north of Manhattan
Speaker 2: in Westchester County, and on a subway platform in Brooklyn.
Speaker 2: A barge captain even pulled a five footer out of
Speaker 2: the East River in nineteen thirty seven and reportedly decided
Speaker 2: to keep it as a pet. It was reported that
Speaker 2: the Bronx River was swarming with them. An authority set
Speaker 2: out to capture them for an installation at the zoo.
Speaker 2: But where did all of these gators come from? You
Speaker 2: might ask? Well, before Amazon took over, we used to
Speaker 2: order a lot of things from the back pages of
Speaker 2: all kinds of magazines, and in the backs of the
Speaker 2: magazines aimed at young boys pistoled all kinds of stuff,
Speaker 2: practical jokes, card games, and even baby alligators. For one
Speaker 2: fifty at pop you could have your very own baby
Speaker 2: dinosaur ship to you right through the US Postal Service.
Speaker 2: It was a brisk business in those days, especially for
Speaker 2: the kids whose parents wouldn't get them a dog. And
Speaker 2: I'm sure that there were many parents who, upon meeting
Speaker 2: their new room rate we usually had just gotten their
Speaker 2: kid at puppy and then probably made their kid flush
Speaker 2: their new friends down the drain.
Speaker 1: Grimm and Mild Presents Bedside Manners was executive produced by
Speaker 1: Aaron Manke and narrated by Aaron Mankey and Robin Minitter.
Speaker 1: Writing for this season was provided by Robin Miniter, with
Speaker 1: research by Sam Alberty, Taylor Haggerdorn and Robin Minutter. Production
Speaker 1: assistants was provided by Josh Thain, Jesse Funk, Alex Williams,
Speaker 1: and Matt Frederick. You can learn more about this show,
Speaker 1: the Grimm and Mild team and all the other podcasts
Speaker 1: that we make over at Grimandmild dot com, and as always,
Speaker 1: thanks for listening