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People Tried Unworkable Methods to Ward off Illness Outbreaks in History

Khalid Elhassan March 31, 2020 33 min

Physician - Goat gland — Brinkley's hospital operating room. Imgur

39. Living in Sewers

Most plague cures were based on superstition, ignorance, and dubious logic of the kind that put two and two together to come up with nine. An example is the line of reasoning that took people from figuring that the plague – or some variants thereof – was airborne, and the solution: head to the sewers.

People began visiting, and sometimes even living in, stinky sewers. It was thought that the sewers’ horrible stench would discourage the clean but disease-ridden air from coming near them. Not only did it not work, it also made those visiting and living in the sewers susceptible to other illnesses caused by their vile surroundings.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.