It struck me recently how little we understand the past. I was reading an article titled The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894 and it begins as follows:
By the late 1800s, large cities all around the world were “drowning in horse manure”. In order for these cities to function, they were dependent on thousands of horses for the transport of both people and goods.
In 1900, there were over 11,000 hansom cabs on the streets of London alone. There were also several thousand horse-drawn buses, each needing 12 horses per day, making a staggering total of over 50,000 horses transporting people around the city each day.
To add to this, there were yet more horse-drawn carts and drays delivering goods around what was then the largest city in the world.
This huge number of horses created major problems. The main concern was the large amount of manure left behind on the streets. On average a horse will produce between 15 and 35 pounds of manure per day, so you can imagine the sheer scale of the problem. The manure on London’s streets also attracted huge numbers of flies which then spread typhoid fever and other diseases.
Of course, you never get a sense of that in movies set in that period, probably because the directors are not aware that there was such a problem but even if they were it would be difficult to recreate and would only distract from the plot anyway. There's a tendency to imagine that the not too distant past was not all that different from the present time and differed largely only in respect of certain technological innovations being missing.
Even more recently, beginning in the 1940s, whole neighborhoods were doused in DDT as this video shows and this article explains. To quote from the article:
Shocking 1940s video shows how US children were sprayed with dangerous pesticide as neighbourhoods were gassed with the 'miracle cure' that could kill mosquitoes and end Polio ... DDT became prevalent in the United States from around 1943 onwards as many viewed it as a miracle cure for polio. An astonishing 1.34 billion tonnes of the chemical was sprayed across the United States in the years between 1946 and 1962. Its impact on the environment was significant, making its way into the food supply and being reported to cause neurological problems in livestock such as cows. While the effects on people are more widely debated, there are still reports of significant health issues being caused as a result of exposure to DDT. The Pesticide Action Network (PAN) of North America states: 'Studies show a range of human health effects linked to DDT and its breakdown product, DDE including, breast and other cancers, male infertility, miscarriages and low birth weight, developmental delay and nervous system and liver damage.' DDT was used well into the 1950s. After a review the U.S. government moved to ban its use in 1972.
I was a child in the 1950s and fortunately, as far as I can remember, DDT wasn't sprayed about in Brisbane Australia but it clearly was in the United States and probably other countries. The irony is that DDT can cause polio-like symptoms as explained in the book The Moth in the Iron Lung: A Biography of Polio. Without proper historical knowledge, an understanding of the rise and fall of the polio epidemic in the 20th century is impossible. The same is true of the Spanish Flu that followed in the aftermath of the Great War.
The narrative being pushed by the media and the medical mafia is that modern medicine has triumphed and continues to triumph over the onslaught of dangerous pathogens. The reality is vastly different of course and the examples of polio and the Spanish flu are a reminder of this.
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