Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the discharge of our faeces into the ever-expanding cities caused serious illness and stench. Nature's self-cleaning power simply couldn't handle these amounts. The history of our current sanitation is therefore mainly a story about poo and pee.
The Romans were way ahead of their time. The Roman city of Colonia Agrippina located on the Rhine, later Cologne, was supplied with water from about 80 AD with the 95 kilometer long Eifelkanal that collected spring water from the Eifel and carried it to the city. The water, about 500 liters per inhabitant per day, was first distributed among the many fountains of the city. These were in constant operation and distributed in such a way that no resident had to walk more than 50 meters. In addition, a pipe supplied the bathhouses and public toilets with water, and there were house connections for the wealthy inhabitants of the city. The waste water disappeared via the Römerkanal, a subterranean sewer of 2.10 m high and 1.22 m wide, to the Rhine. The Eifel Canal has been in operation for 200 years. This practice was later lost.
Deplorable conditions
In the early Middle Ages (500-950) the population declined sharply. The causes were diverse. In addition to war and famine, epidemic diseases were also to blame. These came along with invading steppe peoples during migrations. After that, the population increased again and the cities grew rapidly. In those cities, however, the housing and living conditions were appalling. The houses were small, many houses had only one room in which life took place. The sanitary facilities were basic; people relieved themselves in a pisspot or bucket, or in the yard above a cesspool, but sometimes just in the street. The buckets were emptied into a cesspool, on the street, in a gutter or in a ditch or ditch. There were also collection points for buckets and cesspools were emptied. The collected faeces were sold as fertilizer to farmers in the area. Sometimes a homeowner provided a sewer that discharged into the canal.
There was no good drinking water. The water that was used came from collected rainwater that was stored in a well. The quality of this water left much to be desired, especially if contamination from a nearby cesspool occurred, which was almost unavoidable.
There was not much solid dirt. What little people wanted to get rid of often ended up in the canal. As a result, there was an unbearable stench, especially in the working-class neighbourhoods. The canals of the medieval towns must have stank for hundreds of years, as is apparent from the quote by Pleyte from the book 'Leiden before 300 years and now' from 1874:The Pieterskerkgracht ..., filled in after the favorable decision of the government in 1604, followed by the request made in 1601 by the citizens living there (who could no longer bear the great stench) to have her dampened at their own expense.
Inspects were to no avail
The city councils were aware of this and tried to improve the situation with inspections (legislation). Inspections contain stipulations that earth, garbage, manure, tripe, blood, ashes, sweepings, hay, straw, shards, fish and offal, faeces, etc. may not be thrown into the water. Due to the lack of an alternative and poor enforcement, these standards were not observed and so the carcasses of cows, horses, pigs, dogs and cats floated around in the canals for years.
Everything smelled awful; the houses, the people, the animals, the water, all miasma. Miasma is the foul-smelling air that comes from rotting garbage, unburied corpses, swamps, polluted canals and ditches, and the foul-smelling breath of the sick. In such a situation, diseases could easily break out, and they did. The plague spread between 1346 and 1688 and from 1832 to 1866 the cholera reached epidemic proportions. The miasma was blamed for the development of both diseases. This miasma theory persisted well into the nineteenth century.
From the sixteenth century onwards, plague houses appeared, where plague victims were treated with sweat cures, bloodletting, enemas and the cutting of plague bumps. The plague occurred in many cities, such as Amsterdam, Leiden, Rotterdam, Alkmaar, Utrecht and Middelburg, especially in the densely populated and polluted neighborhoods of the poor. The consequences were huge. Companies went bankrupt because the employees no longer showed up. Annual fairs were banned by mayors and eating lettuce and spinach was discouraged.
The city council laid down many measures regarding isolation of the sick person and prevention through hygiene in ordinances. For example, everyone had to clean the sidewalk and the gutter once or twice a week, take dead animals to the garbage can, not throw filth on the street and no longer deposit blood from bloodletting in the street or in the canal. In 1688 the plague had been eradicated, but it was not until 1894 that the French-Swiss physician Alexandre Yersin discovered that the disease was caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis and spreads through rat fleas.
Amsterdam hygienists
Around 1840 a group of reformist doctors, engineers, administrators and politicians formed in Amsterdam, who later became known as the Amsterdam hygienists. For fifty years they strived to improve public health by promoting better housing, working conditions, drinking water and sanitation and were concerned about the lack of attention given by the city authorities. Now and then the city council did something, such as filling up a smelly canal or issuing a new list of prohibitions or commandments, but there was no real improvement of the situation. The poor water quality in the canals seemed insoluble.
Rapid acceleration
After about 1850 everything around public hygiene gains momentum. A combination of factors is important for this. Due to Thorbecke's constitutional revision in 1848, the hygienists are involved in local and national politics by granting active and passive suffrage and through open government. Due to the Municipalities Act of 1851, public health and its supervision became part of the municipal administration and with the establishment of the State Medical Supervision in 1865, almost all hygienists became employees of this State Supervision.
Furthermore, it is slowly dawning on city officials that public sanitation systems are a drain on public resources and that implementation or non-execution cannot depend on a positive financial outcome. The real causes of plague and cholera are also being discovered. In 1894 from the plague and in 1884 from the cholera. The miasmatic theory was now a thing of the past.
On a private initiative, the first drinking water from the dunes in Amsterdam was supplied and distributed in 1853. Other cities followed after it turned out that Amsterdam was almost free from cholera epidemics after the construction of the dune water pipeline. Municipal water companies were established. In 1949, the Netherlands had 212 water companies, which means that 75 percent of the Dutch population had access to tap water.
Faecal discharge
At the end of the nineteenth century, three systems were considered for the disposal of faeces:the barrel system, the Liernur system and sewage systems with a discharge far outside the city. The main objective was to improve urban water quality and to maximize the financial value of the waste for agriculture. In addition, the flushing of the city waters could also be improved.
The choice was not easy. The political choice for financing and the organization played a guiding role in technical development; opting for the profitability of the provisions provided different techniques than opting for collective financing. Agronomists agreed with hygienists that the collection and use of human manure was the most economically desirable. Technicians were for the construction of sewer systems, drivers for flushing. It took until after 1870 before the first barrel systems and winch systems were realized.
Barrel system
With the barrel system, the faeces are collected from house to house and then sold to the agricultural sector. The barrel system was introduced in thirty-four cities between 1871 and 1899. The barrels, which were emptied once or twice a week, were located in a private house in the yard or, in the absence of a yard, also in the kitchen.
When pouring the barrels into a transport truck, something sometimes went wrong and that caused a lot of odor nuisance. In the Jordaan people spoke about the Boldootkar. Boldoot was a well-known Eau de Cologne brand at the time. Some cities had a barrel exchange system where the full barrel was exchanged for a cleaned empty one. The advantages of the barrel system were that the faeces no longer ended up in the surface water, were put to good use and generated money. Disadvantages, however, were the logistics and the stench.
The barrel system has been in operation for a long time, the shit cart drove until 1934 in the Jordaan. In 1963, 122 tons were still in use in Zutphen. The last barrels were in Leeuwarden (1970), IJlst (1972) and Goes (1978).
Liernur System
At the time, Leiden, Dordrecht and Amsterdam opted for the Liernur system, which is based on the separate collection of different flows. The inventor of the system, the colorful Haarlem-born Charles Liernur, was a passionate technician and businessman who wanted to make useful use of valuable substances. The core of his urban cleaning system was the pneumatic collection of faeces with a 'locomobile air pump' (mobile steam engine) and the use of the faeces in agriculture, for making 'poudrette' (dried faeces) or for making sulfuric ammonia , a fertilizer. The faeces no longer ended up in the surface water, which immediately became cleaner, and the sale to agriculture generated money.
At the end of the nineteenth century, 190,000 inhabitants (40 percent of the population) were connected to it in Amsterdam. The emergence of the water supply and the water closet, as a result of which the faeces were diluted too much to be able to sell them, meant the end of the Liernur system. It was abolished in 1912.
Central sewage and wastewater treatment
As the drinking water supply was further introduced and more closely aligned with the needs of the population, clarity began to emerge about the direction of sanitation. Not the undiluted collection and agricultural use of faeces with the barrel system or the Liernur system would be applied on a large scale, but the combination of drinking water – toilet – sewage system. This effectively eliminated the possibility of simply using the valuable waste materials as fertilizer.
Application of a central sewerage system, i.e. with one discharge point for all connected residents and companies, for the discharge of faeces also provided opportunities for connecting rainwater and waste water from companies (whether or not after partial treatment) and to discharge them outside the city. . Where exactly the waste water went could differ per city. If a city was located on a large river or by the sea (including Rotterdam, The Hague, Amsterdam), the wastewater would go there.
Simple sewage treatment plants (WWTPs) have existed since 1900 for mainly slaughterhouses, dairies, insane asylums and barracks. The first WWTP for biological treatment of domestic waste water dates from 1906 and was located in Voorburg; 15 more followed between 1920 and 1950. Things started to pick up after 1970 when the Surface Waters Pollution Act came into effect and made the purification of waste water mandatory.
In total, four cholera epidemics occurred in the Netherlands in quick succession:in 1832-1833, 1848-1849, 1853-1855 and 1866-1867. The second epidemic was especially severe:about 23,000 people were killed across the country, more than half of whom died. About 2,300 deaths were counted in Amsterdam. After that, the Blue Death never again wreaked havoc on that scale.
Thorough epidemiological research between 1849 and 1854 by the English physician John Snow showed that cholera was spread through contaminated drinking water. In 1854 the little-known Italian physician Filippo Pacini – and in 1884 the famous German physician Robert Koch rediscovered – that cholera is caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae .