Plagues and Epidemics - plumbing history ETA: Please NO Covid discussion, there's plenty of threads for that.
This reminds me, I need to change my whole house filter, thanks. I appreciate the lesson on plumbing history, I have personal experience in plumbing growing up and working off a hand-dug well.
“If I had my life to live over again, I’d be a plumber.” — Albert Einstein “If I would be a young man again and had to decide how to make my living, I would not try to become a scientist or scholar or teacher. I would rather choose to be a plumber in the hope to find that modest degree of independence still available under present circumstances.” – Albert Einstein, The Reporter, 18 November 1954
Years ago I read a paper that showed that the greatest factor in extending the life span in recent times was "public health" reforms. Sounds simple today, but clean water, sewer systems, garbage removal, quarantining the sick, controlling insect vectors, etc, alone probably has more impact than medical advances than anything else until the use of antibiotics. If society does collapse, we will again see the "guest bedroom" in the house that made sure the whole family didn't get fleas, catch skin diseases, or get bed bugs in their beds, from those visiting, and there will be some form of quarantine of visitors, and avoiding those with any open signs of disease. Urban life as we know it can not continue without a system of supplying clean water and getting rid of the sewerage. Although the greens will not agree, in the long run southern Calif is bound to collapse without additional water being supplied to the area. Hard to even think of the effect the plumbing trade on the macro level has had on our lives, clean drinking water, the bathing customs, cleaning clothes and our cooking processes, the disposal of human wastes, all depend on the mass utilization of their trade. Fact remains that if civilization does collapse, after the great die off, food poisoning, bad water tied to waste disposal, infectious diseases carried by people or other vectors,and infected wounds, cuts, or slivers, etc, will most likely kill you.
Chell, always interested me that the native bush people of the outback used subincision which acted as a crude form of birth control, as well as limiting who had access to young women, and a fairly high mortality rate and apparently lived for about 60,000 years in the area without having a population explosion or reducing the area to a wasteland by over utilizing resources. One estimate I read indicated that after 60,000 years, the population of the area was less than 1 million. In contrast the settlement of New Zealand by canoe about 1350 lead to a time of plenty of food, a lot of resources and a rapid population expansion and a population of about 110,00 by 1700. By the 1500 resources were becoming limited and both weapons and warfare are found in the archaeological studies. By the time of the arrival of the westerners, they had hunted several species to extinction and were engaged in conflict between the native groups for resources. While the culture was in many ways destroyed during the "occupation", the population that is Maori today is about 800,000 in New Zealand and 175,000 or so in Australia, or probably the highest it has ever been. We in the more "advanced" cultures have not yet managed to achieve a balance and once we get adequate food, shelter, and sanitation, like all other animals, our population expands until disease, starvation, immigration, or war reduces it to point that the resources can again sustain them.
