Let’s face it: 2020 has been fairly miserable thus far. The only thing that seems to knock a lethal pandemic from world headlines are riots and looting amid protests against police brutality.

We need some positivity right now – a reminder of Western Civilization’s myriad accomplishments to counteract our current rough patch.

Top 10 Reasons We Should Revive the Dark Ages

Engineering, science, literature, commerce. We’ve done some amazing things, my friends. Hold your heads up high and enjoy the following historical highlight reel. Here’s to the brilliant men and women of history who crafted the greatest civilization the earth has ever known.

10 Plumbing

… is a weird way to start this list. Weird, but incredibly important. You can’t build cities without a water supply, and you can’t build livable cities without a supply of clean water and the ability to wash away human waste.

The first intricate system of underground pipes was developed around the 18th Century B.C. by the Minoan civilization in modern-day Crete. Their capital city, Knossos, had a two-way plumbing system that supplied water and provided sanitation, and also incorporated storm sewage canals to prevent flooding (and disgusting backups) during heavy rains.

Remarkably considering its early date, the Minoans also had the first known flush toilets^[1] – ground-floor latrines with overhead water containers. Some palaces even had rudimentary inverted siphon systems^[2] complete with glass-covered clay pipes, that were found in working condition some 3,000 years later. How’s that for craftsmanship?

Other Western cultures were plumbing pioneers as well. Ancient Greeks in Athens employed an indoor pipe system that, among other perks, permitted pressurized showers. Later, in the First Century A.D., the Greek inventor Heron used pressurized piping for firefighting purposes in the city of Alexandria.

9 Coins as Common Currency

A significant stride in the history of world commerce came when it was no longer necessary to barter or haggle over unofficial units of currencies that only a segment of the populace recognized as legitimate.

Though a uniform currency is so clearly advantageous a concept that numerous civilizations undoubtedly pined for its inception, incorporating an acceptable monetary unit is easier said than done. For starters, it takes stability: for currency to be universally considered such, it must be issued by a recognized governing authority, to distinguish it from the various tokens, barter chips or other casual currencies exchanged nearly since the dawn of mankind.

The vehicle is just as important and, here, metal coins meet a number of prerequisites. Besides being difficult to counterfeit, metal coins can confer value both representatively (i.e. value backed by a governing body) and physically (i.e. by being composed of some percentage of precious metal, such as gold or silver). Coins also are both portable and non-perishable.

While the promise of coins as official currency was likely apparent for millennia, the first one to check all these boxes was the Lydian Stater.^[3] Introduced sometime in the late 7th Century B.C., they were made from an impressively consistent mix of 55% gold, 45% silver, and a small amount of copper for durability’s sake.

It was, in part, invention by necessity: Ancient Lydia was a mercantile center of trade occupying modern-day western Turkey, including the incredibly well-preserved port city of Ephesus.^[4] Conquered by Alexander the Great, it was absorbed into the Seleucid Empire in the 4th Century B.C., its contributions to human history well intact despite the military defeat. In 133 BC it was incorporated into the Roman Empire.

8 Proliferation of Democracy

The practice of citizens taking a widespread role in determining their own governance has roots in ancient Greece. In fact, the word “democracy” derives from the Greek words for people (demos) and rule (kratos).

While prior civilizations likely provided citizens at least some say in who wielded authority over them, a formal, more mature form of self-government developed in Greece sometime around the late 6th or early 5th Century B.C.^[5] Ancient Greek democracy comprised the Ekklesia, who wrote laws and dictated foreign policy; the Boule, representatives from the ten Athenian tribes; and the Dikasteria, public courts where citizens debated before a group of lottery-selected jurors.

The Boule in particularly was refreshingly random: Each year, 500 names were chosen from the entirety of Athens’ citizenry to serve for one year, during which time they proposed new laws and oversaw various aspects of the political process. Unlike modern representative democracies, laws in ancient Greece were voted on by citizens themselves, known as “direct democracy.” When a new law was proposed, all citizens had the opportunity to vote on it by attending an assembly, using shards of pottery called ostraka as ballots.^[6]

Though Ancient Greek democracy bore little logistical resemblance to today’s representative governments, the goals were similar: allowing people a voice in the laws by which they must abide was a stabilizing force that gave society a citizenry-backed legitimacy. Regular elections gave satisfaction to those who voted for items that were adopted, and hope for those who felt differently. The process also limited any one person’s power and encouraged the peaceful transfer of governing authority.

7 Ancient Classical Literature

Fully explaining the contributions of ancient classical literature would take 250 lists rather than 250 words, so let’s just touch upon what it means to us, right now, in the 21st Century.

Besides contributing mightily to various contemporary literary and cinematic motifs – dramas, hero journeys, comedies – ancient Greek and Roman literature showcases that the vast majority of today’s issues were prominent in life well over two millennia ago. If you’re ever feeling tragically unique, try picking up a Greek tragedy.

Take Medea, for instance (not the Tyler Perry one,^[7] the ancient Greek one^[8]). Readers are left to interpret whether the title character was a ruthless murderer who poisoned a king and slaughtered her own children in cold blood… or a scorned fiancé who took the only viable option she saw available to her. At its heart, it’s a tale of female powerlessness with deadly consequences.

Taking umbrage with the government? So did Sophocles’ Antigone, who buried her brother, Polynices, against the wishes of a king who deemed him a traitor. When caught, Antigone claims the superiority of divine right over human law. Her reward is a sentence to be buried alive.

No justice, no resting in peace – for anyone. The king changes his mind too late, as Antigone hangs herself before the sentence can be carried out. The king’s son, who’d fallen in love with her, also commits suicide – as does his mother, when she learns of her son’s fate. Antigone brings the house down with herself, an example of courage and admirable civil disobedience.

The list goes on. Thumbing through the classics is a reassuring, humbling reminder that today’s struggles were also yesteryear’s. Oppression, love, betrayal, misogyny… all right there for the reading.

6 Scholasticism & Scientific Method

No one, of course, can claim to have invented reasoning. But what Western Civilization spearheaded was its formality – ground rules for scientific progress to dispel deeply established yet unproven ideas, and to stand on the shoulders of previous breakthroughs.

Scholasticism^[9] essentially added structure to brainstorming, emphasizing the use of reason in exploring questions of both philosophy and theology. In the 13th Century a student of this practice, Saint Albertus Magnus (Saint Albert the Great), called for distinguishing revealed truth (revelation of something unknown through a divine power) from experimental science. Though scholasticism itself was inextricably tied to Church doctrine, this helped provide a modicum of healthy distance between reason and religion, and was an essential component of the transition into to the Renaissance.

Along with student St Thomas Aquinas, Magnus made many scientific observations in astronomy, chemistry, geography and physiology. Another 13th Century peer, Roger Bacon, called for an end to blanket acceptance of preconceived notions, even widely held convictions passed down from such influential ancient minds as Aristotle.

Three centuries later, in 1621, a distant relative of Bacon’s, Francis Bacon, published Novum Organum. The text advocated inductive reasoning as a necessary foundation for scientific thinking. Bacon’s approach consisted of three primary steps,^[10] starting with a plain description of the facts under examination. Those facts are then classified into three categories – instances of its presence (or correctness), instances of its absence (or incorrectness), and instances of its presence in varying degrees (or circumstantial correctness).

From there, an educated conclusion can be drawn about, for example, cause and effect. Bacon’s guidelines set the stage for the modern scientific method,^[11] used to construct and test hypothesis to determine their validity.

Top 10 Myths About The Middle Ages

5 The Printing Press and Mass Literacy

For expansion of human knowledge, the year 1440 may be the most significant demarcation line in the history of mankind. That was the year that Germany native Johannes Gutenberg invented a printing press capable of mass-producing books. (While other presses existed as early as the 3rd Century A.D., Gutenberg’s was the first dedicated to books specifically.)

Before the Gutenberg Press, manufacturing copies of books was an arduous, painstaking by-hand process. Books were therefore both limited and expensive and, because of that, only 30% of Europe’s adults could read by the mid-15th Century. Some places were even worse off: barely 10% of Italians could read Dante’s Divine Comedy upon its publication in 1321. What good are the classics if only one in 10 people can enjoy them?

The Gutenberg Press changed both the economics and availability of books, flooding the market. Literacy rates rose significantly, and the European Renaissance that had begun about a century earlier kicked into overdrive.

“What had been a project to educate only the few wealthiest elite in this society could now become a project to put a library in every medium-sized town,” explains historian Ada Palmer.^[12]

Just as importantly, the press accelerated the pace of advanced education,^[13] allowing knowledge to be shared on a far broader scale than individual teachers could accomplish. It also changed the instruction process itself – especially with technical subjects. Suddenly, complex engineering diagrams, mathematical charts and architectural works could be replicated with vastly increased accuracy and efficiency.

4 Circumnavigation

Naval exploration dates back tens of thousands of years. Many archaeologists consider the first broad-scale seafarers to be the original inhabitants of Australia, some 60,000 years ago.^[14] Polynesians settling Pacific Islands, far-flung Roman Empire water routes and, of course, the oceanic discovery of the New World – first by Nordic explorers and eventually by Columbus – followed.

But no one in recorded history had done something vital to understanding world geography: sailed around the whole of planet Earth.

That began to change exactly 501 years ago, when Ferdinand Magellan^[15] set sail from Spain with five ships, with the goal of finding a faster commerce route to the East Indies.

He didn’t find it. What he did discover, eventually, was a narrow waterway at the southern tip of South America that connected two oceans. Emerging from what is now known as the Strait of Magellan, the explorer marveled at the ocean’s comparable calmness, giving the Pacific – or “peaceful” – Ocean its name.

Magellan never made it all the way back to Spain; in April of 1521 he was killed in a fight with natives in the Philippines. In fact, only one of the original five vessels – the Victoria^[16] – made it back to Spain the following year.

Though they hadn’t found a viable trade route, Magellan’s team had answered an age-old cartographer’s conundrum: how big, exactly, was the world? Magellan’s journey is another demarcation line of human knowledge, allowing for all transportation decisions made thereafter to be holistically informed ones.

3 Aeronautics: To the Moon and Beyond

In 1784, a fascinated Benjamin Franklin and a stereotypically skeptical John Adams were on hand in Paris (they were there to sign the treaty that ended the American Revolution) to witness two Frenchmen make history: Marquis d’Arlandes and Pilatre de Rozier became the first to slip the surly bonds of Earth, courtesy of a hot-air balloon.^[17]

The delicate 70-foot-tall contraption, precariously comprised of linen and varnished paper with hot air provided by burning straw (fire hazard much?), soared as high as 3,000 feet before touching down five miles away. “Aeronauts,”‘ as they were called, became instant heroes, with balloon motifs adorning everything fashions to furniture: inflated dresses,^[18] balloon fans, powder boxes, chandeliers, needlepoint chairs.

Though it took more than a century, Western civilization also made the next giant leap into the skies, when Wilbur and Orville Wright constructed the first successful airplane in 1903.^[19] Though initially rudimentary, Western engineering advanced aeronautics exceptionally fast – quick enough for both sides to strafe and bomb each other in the Great War little more than a decade later.

And then, 50 years later, the unthinkable: a man on the moon. All cynicism aside, take a moment and let it sink in that just 66 years after the first airplane flight, Western civilization flew people to the moon, allowed them to get out and bounce around, and brought them back alive. The achievement was so historic that “Men Walk on Moon”^[20] became the largest font size (96 pt.) ever to grace the front page of the conventionally low-key New York Times. The font has been used just three times since, with:

NIXON RESIGNS
U.S. ATTACKED, and
OBAMA^[21]

2 The Factory Production Line

In December 1913, Henry Ford introduced the first moving assembly line in history. The exercise in streamlining centered around the idea that a worker can accomplish the same action repeatedly far more expediently than a variety of disparate actions in succession.

The change resulted in one of the greatest exponential labor efficiency improvements ever: the time it took to build one of Ford’s signature Model T automobiles was reduced from over 12 hours to two hours and 30 minutes, a nearly five-fold decrease.^[22]

Crucially, Ford’s production line greatly expanded middle-class access to cars, which were quickly morphing from wealthy status symbol to must-have mode of transportation. By reducing the time, capital investment and manpower needed to build the Model T, Ford could drop its price from $850 to under $300. In this fashion, mass production led to mass consumption – turning millions into drivers and Ford into a billionaire.

A decade later, the production line led to another innovation: the five-day, 40-hour workweek. The efficiency created by assembly belts and personnel customization made manufacturing so fast and easy that longer hours and six-day workweeks were no longer necessary to meet demand and turn handsome profits; this held true even though Ford had more than doubled salaries in 1914 to a then-impressive $5 per day.^[23] The production line, then, ushered in a new era of work-life balance still a hallmark of healthy middle class lifestyles.

1 Christianity

Christendom: it’s an old term that covers much of the western world (and some parts beyond). It is on this list at position one for a very good reason: despite the fact that there have been some dark times that Christianity may have contributed to, on the whole, the western world as we know it exists today thank to the efforts of medieval monks and scholars, and Christian people of good will.^[24] The so-called dark ages were a time in which monks were secreted away in cold frowsty monasteries working tirelessly to maintain all of the wisdom of the ancient world in the form of illuminated manuscripts.

Additionally, thanks to convents and the sisters within, the female voice was saved for posterity. In the 16th century the only defender of women seemed to be the popes who refused to allow King Henry to simply cast off any wife he wanted. And without the astonishingly important contributions of the likes of the the humble St Claire of Assisi, Polymath Saint Hildegard von Bingen, and doctor of the Church Saint Teresa of Ávila the world would be a different place today. Saint Hildegard’s impact on European society in her time was immense; she should be a household name. Some of her music is in the video clip above.

Art, music, literature, social justice, manners and so many other parts of our society exist in the form we know them today thanks to the impact of Christianity on the governments of western society. The world is in upheaval right now, so it seems fitting to end this list with a quote from the Bible that, above all else, is important for us to remember today: “All things therefore whatsoever you would that men should do to you, do you also to them.” (St Matthew 7:12)^[25]

Top 10 Misconceptions About The Catholic Church

About The Author: Christopher Dale (@ChrisDaleWriter) writes on politics, society and sobriety issues. His work has appeared in Daily Beast, NY Daily News, NY Post and Parents.com, among other outlets.

We expect clean streets and long lives in the developed Western world, where health care programs and disease prevention comprise a thriving industry. But public health infrastructure is a relatively recent development in modern society, born and brought up on the backs of some of the greatest engineers, researchers, and physicians history has ever known.

Here is a list providing an overview of the facts and events that occurred during the Western sanitation movement of the 19th and 20th centuries. You can thank this movement for the fact that you don’t have to trudge through feces for your morning cup of coffee or risk contracting cholera every time you get a drink of water.

10 The Industrial Revolution And Increasing Population

The 19th-century sanitation movement came at a key point in early American and European history. The cleanliness and health of city reisdents was quite poor. Sanitation increasingly became an issue because of two factors: the Industrial Revolution and immigration. The Industrial Revolution began in Britain because of an abundance of coal and changing ideologies about the economy. Wealth and travel would increase, and as a result, many people would immigrate to big cities in Britain and the United States looking for work and wealth.

In the US, the population in the urban areas of the country rose from around 1.8 million to over 54 million between 1840 and 1920. As a result, waste would build up, in the form of both human filth and industrial debris, and there would initially be no organized public effort to preserve the health of the people.^[1]

9 John Howard’s Prison Reform

John Howard was a dedicated philanthropist in the mid- to late 18th century, and his greatest contribution was his advocacy for prison reform and improvements in sanitation and overall public health. Howard became the sheriff of Bedfordshire in 1773. Supervising the county jail, he observed the horrid conditions of the facility and its prisoners. English prisoners were expected to pay for all of their essentials. The poorest of them couldn’t afford commodities as fundamental as food, bedding, and clothing. Prisoners were expected to pay off their jailers upon release, so those who could not afford to do so would stay in jail long after their sentence had ended.

Howard’s reporting highlighted the unsanitary conditions of the jails he visited. He wrote three editions to his book on the subject, The State of Prisons in England and Wales, and his frank recollection of the facts gave his words enough credence to avoid any trouble with the authorities in England and Wales. Howard’s advice for improvements would set the standard for what the sanitary movement would advocate for. His calls for proper health care and clean accommodations regardless of economic status, and other suggestions outside of the sanitary conditions, spurred the movement into the public eye for the first time.^[2]

8 Quarantine

Quarantine of the diseased and otherwise ill became a common practice in the 19th century, although implementing such a tactic was sporadic. In the United States, federal involvement in the form of legislation passed by Congress only occurred in 1878 after yellow fever outbreaks.^[3] Port cities with lots of trade ships and immigration were areas in the US that implemented quarantine councils, voluntary general hospitals, and community health centers most fervidly.

In 1808, the Boston Board of Health ordered that ships coming from certain tropical posts such as the Mediterranean and Caribbean had to be quarantined for three days or until 25 days had passed since they left port, whichever came later, before crew and cargo could integrate with society. These planned, public actions against diseases like cholera and smallpox were the first of their kind and paved the way for further focused attempts to keep these illnesses at bay.

7 Edwin Chadwick And Miasma Theory

The most ironic thing about the Western sanitary movement was the people who peddled it. There were two opposing theories about how diseases spread: germ theory and miasma theory (aka anti-contagionist theory), both of which had their fair share of believers. The germ theory, which we currently accept, states that certain diseases enter the body as microorganisms invisible to the naked eye. The miasma theory affirmed that exposure to the environment, from things such as sewage, noxious fumes, and, crucially, poor sanitation, caused the diseases around us. Miasma theory would prove to be false, but the effect it had on the sanitary awakening is astonishing.

One of miasma theory’s biggest advocates, and one of the most influential sanitary reformers of his time, was Edwin Chadwick. Chadwick campaigned for the passage of the Public Health Act of 1848, an act which reflected most of the arguments Chadwick had written about years earlier in General Report on The Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain. Chadwick was sure that if we improved the health of the poor, it would have a positive effect on the country’s economy, as fewer people would need to seek poor relief for sick and dying family members. Improvements such as better drainage systems for the sewers, clean drinking water, and a medical officer appointed to each town were listed in the act, but a limitation on money and influence dimmed its effectiveness at making lasting change.^[4]

Ironically, even if Chadwick’s beliefs about diseases would be disproven, they still positively affected society by pushing for the public health awareness and systems we benefit from today.

6 John Snow And The Cholera Outbreak

John Snow was a staunch opponent of Edwin Chadwick on the battlefield of 19th-century disease theory. Snow was the physician to Queen Victoria, and the germ theorist determined the source of an outbreak of cholera, an intestinal disease that wreaked havoc across England. Snow was skeptical of the idea that cholera entered the body through the air, instead believing that it stemmed from contamination in the water that sufferers drank. In the 1800s, sewage systems hadn’t been standardized yet, so people would have to collect their drinking and bathing water from community pumps or wells while dumping waste into the Thames river or pits called cesspools. Snow suspected that the waste from these areas was seeping into the drinking water, but he couldn’t prove it to other scientists of the time until a cholera outbreak in 1854.

The outbreak began in the suburb of Soho, where Snow just so happened to live at the time. Snow wrote of the epidemic, “Within 250 yards of the spot where Cambridge Street joins Broad Street there were upwards of 500 fatal attacks of cholera in 10 days. As soon as I became acquainted with the situation and extent of this irruption [sic] of cholera, I suspected some contamination of the water of the much-frequented street-pump in Broad Street.”^[5] So Snow documented where those who had contracted cholera lived and compared their locations to the different water pumps in the suburb by drawing his own map. Eventually, he pinpointed the water pump on Broad Street as the source of the contamination.

Snow’s map helped pioneer the field of epidemiology, a branch of medicine focused on how diseases distribute and how they can be contained and controlled. Most miasma theorists, Chadwick included, weren’t convinced that their beliefs were false by Snow’s research. But regardless of Snow’s personal convictions, both sides of the disease debate took his findings as evidence that proper city sanitation had to be a priority to avoid outbreaks of illness in the future.

5 The New York Sanitary Survey

Focusing back on the States, New York City was a garbage dump. Manure sat in the streets, and noxious fumes filled the air. It is estimated that over 200,000 cases of entirely preventable diseases caused by an ineffective Board of Health occurred every year. In 1850, Lemuel Shattuck would write a plan for a new public health program in the US based on miasma theory. Out of the 50 suggestions that Shattuck proposed, more than half would become universally accepted practices in modern times.

In 1865, more than a decade after Shattuck’s report, the Association’s Special Council of Hygiene and Public Health would assign a group of inspectors to conduct a citywide survey of all 31 districts of New York.^[6] The survey in question was nine pages long, and by the end of the program, 17 volumes of review would lead to the enactment of the 1866 Metropolitan Health Bill. Many revisions to New York’s health codes would follow over the next century, but this survey would continue to form the basis of all public health laws from this point on.

4 Chesbrough’s Sewage System Design

To the west, Chicago was also amid a health crisis after a fierce outbreak of intestinal and bowel infections. Chicago’s waste disposal system was unfortunately similar to the situation John Snow had faced in Soho. Sewage dumped in the Chicago River had dispersed into Lake Michigan, Chicago’s main water source. Also, because of how close the water they were drawing from was to the land, small fish would regularly be sucked into the drain and shot out of flowing water faucets. Residents would joke about the water, saying, “When you turned on the water, you got chowder!”^[7]

Ellis S. Chesbrough had started working as a chainman on a railway survey when he was only 13 years old, missing out on much of his schooling. Regardless of his lacking education, Chesbrough’s career as an engineer flourished until he was eventually hired as the chief engineer of the Boston Water Works in 1846. He built many of Boston’s most important water-related structures, such as the Brookline Reservoir, which supplied water to every resident in Boston.

Later, after leaving Boston for Chicago, Chesbrough became an engineer for the Chicago Board of Sewerage Commissioners. He was tasked with giving the city the first comprehensive sewer system in the entire country. After studying several of Europe’s best sewage systems, Chesbrough first constructed a water crib, which is a boat-like structure that collects water from the bottom of lakes and sends it to pumping stations on the shore. Next, Chesbrough decided that drainage was being hindered by the city itself being too low to the ground for his new sewers to fit. So, in a feat famous among civil engineers and all of Chicago, Chesbrough had the city raised roughly 3 meters (10 ft) off the ground. Lifting the buildings using jackscrews, Chesbrough had new foundations built under every single domicile, despite the complaints and legal threats of the business owners because of the costs of the project.

Chesbrough’s design revolutionized the city streets, as waste was now properly filtered and managed under his innovations, which furthered his reputation as America’s best authority on urban water and sewer issues.

3 George E. Waring

After the horrors of the US Civil War and a yellow fever outbreak that ravaged Tennessee in 1878, one of the most influential figures in both miasma theory and 19th-century sanitation would build his reputation. George E. Waring was a drainage and agricultural engineer and a Civil War veteran who would be the first man to establish sanitary engineering as a reputable career.

Waring had already earned praise in New York City during the late 1850s for his design and construction of Central Park’s drainage system, which would form the park’s ponds and lakes. In 1878, during a yellow fever epidemic, Waring would create a drainage system in Memphis, Tennessee, that mirrored the work of Chesbrough in Chicago. By separating the stormwater runoff that flooded the paved roads of Memphis from regular sewage waste, Waring could reduce the sizes of the sewage pipes and lower the chances of leakage.

Later, Waring set his sights back on New York. Improvements had been made in the Big Apple, but the standard of living was still lacking. Garbage was dumped into the streets in places that the majority of the working class and immigrant population called home, causing disease to amass in spades. After becoming the head of New York’s sanitation department, Waring recruited his own personal army called the “White Ducks” (or the “White Wings”) because of their stark white uniforms. Two thousand men strong, Waring’s army organized a new recycling ethic when they cleaned 697 kilometers (433 mi) of street. They boiled organic waste to make oil and grease, they swept the ash off the roads, and they sorted the garbage from the recyclables.^[8]

Sixteen years later, half of all cities in the US would have sewage systems, and the rest of the developed world would soon follow. Waring left the United States in 1898 to study sanitation techniques in Cuba, where he would tragically die after, ironically, contracting yellow fever. The New York Times paid tribute to him by writing, “There is not a man or a woman or a child in New York who does not owe [Waring] gratitude for making New York, in every part, so much more fit to live in than it was when he undertook the cleaning of the streets.” Waring would be remembered as America’s “apostle of cleanliness.”

2 The Founding Of Bacteriology

As the health of the individual became a public issue rather than a private one, society would advance its knowledge on the diseases it had once feared. This newfound curiosity soon killed the miasma theory of disease and thrust the germ theory that people like John Snow had advocated for into the spotlight. One founder of bacteriology was Ferdinand Cohn, who had started to study bacteria in the late 1860s. Cohn organized known bacteria into a classification system based on their morphological differences.

Cohn would be a consultant of Robert Koch, a German bacteriologist who discovered the bacteria responsible for diseases such as tuberculosis and cholera. A French chemist and microbiologist named Louis Pasteur would discover the bacteria that causes anthrax. Pasteur would eventually develop a vaccine against the disease and another vaccine against rabies. His experiments in the fermentation process of souring milk and alcohol would also provide evidence for the germ theory of fermentation in living organisms.

All of these discoveries would inspire intervention efforts to prevent the spread of diseases and eventually wipe them out. The germ theory and bacteriology would force a sound scientific basis into all public health efforts as the sanitary movement closed in on its final objective.^[9]

1 Laboratory Research And Federal Health Services

On February 24, 1888, Surgeon General John B. Hamilton testified in front of the United States Congress. Hamilton was the first to inform Congress of the Laboratory of Hygiene (which would eventually become the National Institutes of Health) when he announced, “I desire to invite the attention of the Committee to the Weekly Abstract published a few weeks ago, in which the diagnosis of cholera was made of the cases that occurred in New York, by an officer of my service by the name of Kinyoun, who spent nearly five years in the study of bacteriology. We spent several hundred dollars in forming a laboratory in New York.”

A few years later, and the US would establish a series of local and state health departments, starting in New York and Massachusetts. The discoveries prior to these laboratories were made in private, and the improvements to water and sewage systems, although revolutionary, were done in the name of a faulty theory. Now, efforts were being put into studying city water systems to detect and control the bacteria recognized as the cause of deadly diseases. At the center of this new era was biologist William T. Sedgwick, a founder of the Harvard School of Public Health in 1913. Sedgwick identified bacteria from fecal matter that causes typhoid disease, eventually developing the first treatment technique. One historian described Sedgwick’s book on his research, Principles of Sanitary Science and Public Health, as “possibly the most potent single factor in awakening leaders in medicine, engineering, and science to the importance of sanitation in that era of rapid urban and industrial development.”^[10]

All the research done in these facilities would allow doctors to diagnose patients far earlier, which helped keep contagious illnesses from spreading. Still, scientists soon realized that treatment and immunization wouldn’t be enough to fully eradicate the diseases that festered most aggressively in the poor and uneducated. So, at the beginning of the 20th century, the sanitation movement would reach its final stage: the education of the common man about personal health care in favor of a healthier society. Federal health services would fund public and military disease control programs. These efforts would have their successes, failures, steps forward, and steps backward. The fight continues to this day as a combination of scientific research and social values that set the foundation for solid public health.

Savannah O. Skinner is a freelance writer and author sometimes working under the pen name S.O. Skinner.