5 of the Grossest Problems of History

We as a society simply don’t appreciate modern hygiene systems enough

We as a society simply don’t appreciate modern hygiene systems enough. Quick, go wash your hands in the kitchen sink. Open the door beneath it, remove the bag from the trash can and take it to the dumpster outside, which will be emptied at least weekly. Enjoy the near certain dearth of corpses in it. 

You’ve just enjoyed a lifestyle most of the people who’ve ever lived couldn’t even dream of. The fact of the matter is, in the not-too-distant past…

There Was Horse Poop Everywhere

For most of human history, the best way to get somewhere was to convince a horse to take you, even after we started industrializing and crowding into cities. That meant, for the window of time between the rise of urbanization and the ubiquity of cars, every major city was covered in horse shit. In fact, New York City’s brownstones have those iconic stoops looming high over the streets for the express purpose of literally rising above the shit.

Central Rivers Were Garbage Dumps

It’s not like there was really any place to take it. Landfills weren’t so much a thing yet, so we pretty much dumped all of our trash into the river. In fact, centuries of treating the Thames River as one big toilet/dumpster led to an event in 1858 called the Great Stink, when the smell of the river was so disruptive to the nearby Parliament that they considered moving and ultimately just outlawed it. Don’t think the phenomenon was limited to the redcoats, either: The Mississippi has seen some things.

Get Ready to Fight a Man for Your Bath Water

Obviously, clean water was hard to come by in Victorian times. If you were poor, your landlord was only required to provide you with whatever you could collect from what was basically a big fire hydrant that was turned on for just a few hours once a week. The problem was that all the other tenants needed water, too, so “there were literally crowds of people queuing and fighting.” If you were a coward, there was always the river. Better start working on your right cross.

Rats Might Bite Your Balls

Going back further, to Ancient Rome, plumbing was a bit more sophisticated, but you still had to poop in a hole above a pit. That meant all manner of creatures, mostly rats and snakes, might crawl up and take a taste of your squishy parts at any time. They also had a habit of catching fire, but somehow, scorched ass hair doesn’t have quite the same threatening aura as a cojones-hungry rodent.

When Your Whole Neighborhood Smells Like a Corpse

If you committed a particularly rude crime in medieval Europe, your body might be placed in a cage called a gibbet and hung for all to see as you rotted away into nothing. (You might be executed this way, too, slowly starving to death as everyone ignores you. It was a harsh time.) That’s gross enough, but these cages were often hung in residential areas — you know, to get the most views. That meant your whole neighborhood might smell like a rotting corpse for weeks or even months at a time. 

In fact, that was the whole reason gibbeting was eventually done away with. The people demanded more humane methods of execution — not due to any moral or philosophical objections, mind you. They merely wanted some peace and scentlessness.

Scroll down for the next article