Drinking Water

by James Salzman

  The need to identify safe sources of water is as crucial for mobile settlements as permanent ones, and nowhere has this been more true than during times of war. As the Roman general Vegetius observed, “An army must not use bad or marshy water: for the drinking of bad water is like poison and causes plagues among those who drink it.” Napoleon was only half right when he said that an army marches on its stomach. It also needs to slake its thirst. Consider that in the Napoleonic Wars, disease killed eight times more soldiers than battle injuries. In the American Civil War, diarrhea and dysentery claimed more lives than the battlefield. And during the pivotal battle of El Alamein during World War II, as many as 50 percent of the German and Italian troops suffered from waterborne diseases. The German general commanding the North African theater, Erwin Rommel, is said to have claimed that his defeat was due to dysentery, not Field Marshal Montgomery’s Eighth Army.

  Nor was dangerous water only in army camps. In many cultures, the most effective strategy to avoid unsafe drinking water has been to avoid water altogether. Part of this aversion was for safety’s sake, but there was a snobbish motive, as well. As a classical scholar has described, the Roman elite regarded water as “the characteristic drink of the subaltern classes, the cheapest and most easily available drink, fit for children, slaves, and the women who had been forbidden from drinking wine very early in the Republic.”

  This aversion to water carried into the Middle Ages. In the time of Charlemagne, high-ranking military officers were punished for drunkenness by the humiliation of being forced to drink water. In the fifteenth century, Sir John Fortescue observed that the English “drink no water unless it be … for devotion.” The sixteenth-century English doctor William Bullein warned that “to drinke colde water is euyll [evil]” and causes melancholy. His contemporary Andrew Boorde claimed that “water is not holsome soole by it self; for an Englysshe man … [because] water is colde, slowe, and slack of dygestyon.” Presumably, water interfered with digestion by cooling the stomach and its furnace-like operation.

  The eighth-century author Paul the Deacon recounts a wonderful anecdote showing the relative prestige of wine and water. A nobleman’s enemies planned to kill him and chose the method of poisoning his wine chalice. As dinnertime approached, they eagerly waited for him to raise the poisoned goblet to his lips. The canny nobleman, however, had suspicions about the wine and foiled the plot by surprising everyone. Instead of drinking wine with his meal, as everyone had expected, he drank water, a liquid so common and beneath his standing that no one had even considered poisoning it. Stooping beneath his station to drink water instead of wine saved the canny nobleman’s life.

  The aversion to water carried over to the New World, as well. As Francis Chapelle has described, despite readily available water in New England, the Pilgrims sought other drinks.

  Drinking water—any water—was a sign of desperation, an admission of abject poverty, a last resort. Like all Europeans of the seventeenth century, the Pilgrims disliked, distrusted, and despised drinking water. Only truly poor people, who had absolutely no choice, drank water. There is one thing all Europeans agreed on: drinking water was bad—very bad—for your health.

  If not water, then what did people drink? The answer in ancient times often was alcohol. The drink of choice in Egypt was beer, and in ancient Greece wine. It may not be surprising that one of the very first buildings constructed in Plymouth Plantation was a brewhouse.

  More common, though, was a mixture of water with another substance. Sometimes this was alcohol. The fifth-century Hippocratic treatise “Airs, Waters, Places” recommended adding wine to even the finest water. Beer was routinely added to water (called “small beer”) in the Middle Ages. Water was also commonly mixed with vinegar, ice, honey, parsley seed, and other spices. This both improved the taste and served as a status symbol. The mixtures elevated the status of what otherwise would have been a common drink. After the discovery of the East Indies, mixing hot water with coffee and tea became popular.

  It is interesting to note that none of these mixing practices was consciously intended to make the water safer to drink, though this often may have been the result. Alcohol added to water retarded and even killed microbes. While India Pale Ale may now be all the rage in microbreweries, the addition of hops was originally intended to preserve ale in the hot colonial outposts of India (unbeknownst to the brewers, it slowed bacterial growth). Boiling water for tea and coffee would have had a similar effect.

  Despite the preference for alcohol over water, water was always drunk, sometimes as plain water but often in the cuisine. Soups, stews, and dried foods were commonly prepared in water. Indeed, in the Middle Ages, more water may have been consumed in a household through prepared foods than drunk. So the question remains, how did those searching for drinking water know the source was safe? Long before recognizing the role or even the existence of microorganisms, people have understood that they need to be careful about what they drink. Over time, different groups’ collective experience of identifying safe water has developed into unwritten rules, oral versions of a safe drinking water act. Importantly, however, these practices focused primarily on the source of the water because that was all they could observe.

  The ancient Greek father of medicine, Hippocrates, for example, wrote that water from rock springs was “bad since it is hard, heating in its effect, difficult to pass, and causes constipation. The best water comes from high ground and hills covered with earth.” Perhaps the greatest water engineers of all, the Romans, designed their aqueducts to segregate drinking water from other uses. The chroniclers of the time debated over which waters should be most prized. Pliny the Elder favored well water, while Columella preferred spring water. Disparaging the choice of the very wealthy, Macrobius counseled against drinking melted snow because it no longer contained water’s healthy vapors.

  Europeans recognized, as well, that certain water sources should be avoided. William Bullein warned in the sixteenth century, for example, that “standing waters and water running neare unto cities and townes, or marish ground, wodes, & fennes be euer ful of corruption, because there is so much filthe in them of carions & rotten dunge, &c.”

  Nor are such practices purely historical. A recent study of villages in Yorubaland, a region in southwestern Nigeria, examined how safe water is identified in traditional African communities today. Just as the Romans and Europeans developed rules to identify safe water, the Yoruba believe that when water comes from the mountains it has a sacred origin and, therefore, it has many qualities that other streams lack. Because a rock represents a mountain, also any water springing under a rock of these streams is believed to be safe. Similarly, rainwater is always regarded as safe because it comes directly from heaven. The local people give movements of flowing water a strong emphasis. They say that it is easy to see if the water is clean and good for human consumption. Flowing water is regarded safe, as the movements will take dirt away.

  In fact, all societies have such rules and practices to identify safe water sources, though they may look very different. In a number of cultures, for example, drinking water is as much a spiritual as a physical resource—water can transmit both physical and metaphysical contaminants. As a result, there are specific rules to prevent spiritual pollution of drinking water. Traditional Hindus in India, for example, maintain a complex social hierarchy among separate castes. Reinforcing this order, upper and lower castes actually draw their water from distinct sources. If sources were shared, there would be a risk of the lower caste transmitting their social pollution from the impure to the pure. This extends to food preparation. A Brahman should not even touch food that has been prepared with water by a non-Brahman.

  In the United States this practice should look familiar. Less than fifty years ago, resource segregation was commonplace in many parts of the South. Drinking fountains were separated by law, with one for “White” and one for “Colored.” This was accepted as entirely justified under the law. While half a world
away, was the anxiety some whites felt over drinking from a fountain that had been used by blacks all that different from the Hindi concern of higher castes drinking from the same sources as lower castes?

  A drinking fountain on the Halifax County courthouse lawn in North Carolina, 1938

  Most of these rules intuitively seem to make sense. We can see if water comes from fast-flowing waters and appreciate why it would be safer to drink than water from a stagnant pool. By contrast, the Safe Drinking Water Act seems light-years from these sorts of norms. The EPA is currently assessing the adverse health effects of the microbe Helicobacter pylori and the chemical 1,2,4-trimethylbenzene. This hyper-technical approach could not seem more distant from checking whether water emerges from under a rock or whether the person who used the well before you was an Untouchable. Yet these sets of rules all seek the very same end—safe drinking water from a trusted source, whether faucet or stream—and they all make sense to their respective societies. Such norms are essential and they are effective, to a point. Indeed, if such rules have endured over long periods of time, almost by definition they have to work; otherwise, the society that followed them would have been incapacitated by waterborne diseases. The Yoruba preference for clear, flowing water makes some sense in a modern light. It avoids the higher microbial activity in warmer, stagnant water.

  Assessing how well such rules work, though, is a complicated matter. To assess that, we need to understand how popular conceptions of disease influence our perceptions of water quality. If water from a particular source is regarded as unsafe, locals have clearly made the connection between drinking the water and some bad result—such as spiritual impurity, blindness, or stomach cramps. But there must also be a causal mechanism lurking beneath this judgment. Today, one might say that people get typhoid because they drink water with typhoid bacteria, of course. But before the microscope revealed an entirely new world beyond our eyes, for most of human history physicians grappled with the problem of people getting sick without any physical contact at all with ill people.

  With our modern understanding of disease, we may look patronizingly on earlier practices of bloodletting or of locating latrines next to wells, but before the era of the germ theory, these seemed entirely reasonable in their respective societies. In fact, cultural understandings of what causes disease, whether physical or spiritual, underpin the rules for drinking water.

  An eighteenth-century French illustration by Johann Lavater shows how these humors were expressed in physical features: phlegmatic in the upper left, then, moving clockwise, choleric, melancholy, and sanguine.

  At the time of the Greeks and Romans, for example, physicians believed that the health of the body depended upon the balance of four humors: black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood. Each humor was linked to specific physical qualities. Blood was warm and moist, while black bile was cold and dry. Hence Bullein’s admonition that drinking cold water was evil. Its chill risked slowing the flow of humors and could cause melancholy. Indeed the name of one particularly virulent waterborne disease, cholera, comes from the term for yellow bile, “choler.” “Sanguine,” equally, came from the humor of blood (“sang” in French), and “phlegmatic” from the humor of phlegm. The task of the physician was to diagnose the illness and deduce the surplus or deficit of each humor causing the ailment. He could then nurse the patient back to proper balance and health. Thus the common practices of bleeding a person or using emetics were both intended to remove surplus humors.

  This conception was eventually supplanted by the miasmatic theory of disease. This theory held that diseases were caused by breathing contaminated air. The general concept was that an airborne mist containing poisonous “miasma” served as the agent of disease and could often be identified by its foul odor. Hence the name for malaria, which means “bad air.” This theory explained how people could quickly infect one another without physical contact, as well as the awful stench surrounding diseased flesh. Although an inaccurate explanation, the miasma theory was effective. Its immediate policy implication—improved cleanliness—no doubt reduced the spread of pathogens.

  A moment’s reflection makes clear the consequences of the miasmatic theory of disease for how people thought about drinking water. If the most threatening diseases—epidemics such as bubonic plague, cholera, and typhoid—were airborne, then drinking water was unlikely to be a serious cause of concern. This is not to say, of course, that people were ignorant of the link between drinking water and disease. People obviously could get sick from drinking certain types of water, but not from the most feared epidemics. The drinking water was safe enough, just not risk-free, to use modern parlance.

  Source Protection

  Once one has identified a reliable and safe source for drinking water, it is essential to protect the source from harms, both seen and unseen. Most obviously, and particularly in arid regions, one must protect against physical appropriation. Where water is scarce, clear property regimes emerge with effective sanctions. As described previously, despite the widespread norm of a Right of Thirst, outsiders still need to ask permission to drink from a well in southern Zimbabwe or a spring in central Australia.

  The most common approach for source protection has been through rules restricting activities that may cause pollution. Biblical text from Deuteronomy, for example, requires that waste be disposed of far away from areas of human habitation. The Babylonian Talmud similarly forbade throwing waste into wells. Nor could tanneries, slaughterhouses, cemeteries, or furnaces operate within twenty-five meters of a well. Some of the earliest environmental laws and policies in England concerned source protection. Building owners were required to keep their street frontages clean. People were paid to collect “night soil” and other waste from streets and cesspits. Dung was collected, transported in boats to the middle of the Thames, and dumped where the current ran strongest.

  Half a world away, Australian aboriginal groups have had clear source protection rules as well. Defecating and starting a fire near a waterhole were vitally serious offenses, giving those responsible for the water the right to punish these transgressions by death. Among the Yoruba in Africa, the head of the community establishes rules for source protection. Bathing and clothes washing are prohibited near drinking water sources, nor are small children or anyone with a disease permitted to walk in nearby streams. Those caught washing clothes near a drinking water source are reported to the King and punished.

  In addition to regulating behavior, societies have long relied on engineering to protect sources. The Book of Genesis describes how the shepherdess Rachel kept her well covered with a rock to keep the water clean. As with all things hydrological, though, for impressive technology, one inevitably looks to Rome. The Romans made the critical realization that water for flushing wastes out of the city was just as important as the clean water piped into the city. While the aqueducts are justly renowned, equally impressive was the Cloaca Maxima, Rome’s sewer system. Constructed in the sixth century BC, the connected pipes and ditches drained the filth of the city’s public toilets, bathhouses, buildings, and streets into the Tiber, which carried it safely away downstream.

  With the fall of the Roman Empire, however, the engineering approach to source protection in Europe largely fell away. Almost no major works were built to address sanitation until well into the nineteenth century, in part perhaps because there was no money to be made, and in part because the connection had not yet been made between sanitation and source protection. For the most part, filth flowed out windows, down the streets, and into the same streams, rivers, and lakes where the city’s inhabitants drew their water. As a result, cities stank to high heaven.

  This state of affairs only became worse as cities grew in population through the Middle Ages. As late as 1854, journalist George Goodwin graphically described London as a “cesspool city. The entire excrementation of the Metropolis shall sooner or later be mingled in the stream of the river, there to be rolled backward and forward around the population
.” The Thames grew so polluted in an 1858 episode, dubbed “The Great Stink” by the Times, that the overpowering stench forced Parliament to adjourn until the odors subsided. In a desperate attempt to make the Houses of Parliament bearable, curtains in the chambers were soaked in chloride of lime. Indeed, one historian has claimed that “the Dark Ages for water were the nineteenth century, when increasing industrialization, urbanization, inadequate hygiene, and inadequate knowledge made drinking water dangerous.”

  By the end of the nineteenth century, however, London’s drinking water and sanitation had improved dramatically, and this was the case in many other European and North American cities. The cause for this sea change was twofold: the development of the germ theory of disease and the “Great Sanitation Awakening.” These came together in the classic story of John Snow and the famed Broad Street Pump.

  Beginning on August 30, 1854, an outbreak of cholera in the Soho area of London resulted in more than five hundred deaths in just ten days. There was nothing particularly notable about this. Cholera and typhoid outbreaks in urban areas were common throughout the nineteenth century. Long known as “the poor man’s plague” because of its prevalence in poor, crowded urban areas, cholera killed remarkably quickly. A victim could feel healthy in the morning and be dead by that evening, felled by painful cramps, vomiting and diarrhea. The disease seemed to be gaining ground, and not just in poor quarters. A cholera outbreak in New York City had killed 3,500 people in 1832, and typhoid had killed more than 50,000 Britons a year earlier. But since common wisdom held that these diseases spread in miasmic air, most precautions taken by the authorities did little to solve the underlying problem. John Snow, though, suspected that miasma was missing the mark. A self-made man, Snow had become an influential London physician, personally chosen to administer chloroform to Queen Victoria during the birth of her son Prince Leopold—the first royal to give birth under anesthesia.