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• chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  They did not know to sanitize water pre germ theory, during cholera outbreaks they would just keep drinking the untreated contaminated water and infecting themselves.

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  • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Because it wasn’t obvious that there had been contact with sewer water, if people go out of their way to get water from a pump that tastes “sweet” then they obviously do not understand that there’s sewage in it, as humans universally agree that drinking sewage is disgusting.

    It doesn’t take germ theory to figure out that funky water tends to make you sick, and ever since we invented fire and had access to waterproof vessels people would have realized that boiling water made it safe. People just don’t tend to bother with such things when they get comfortable, much like how we now very much know about bacteria and yet people don’t bother washing their hands after taking a dump.

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    • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      They didn’t know it had anything to do with the water at all, they thought it was evil smells.

      Because it wasn’t obvious that there had been contact with sewer water, if people go out of their way to get water from a pump that tastes “sweet” then they obviously do not understand that there’s sewage in it, as humans universally agree that drinking sewage is disgusting.

      It doesn’t take germ theory to figure out that funky water tends to make you sick,

      The problem is that water is very often contaminated without seeming contaminated. If you drink water out of a random stream in the woods that looks and tastes totally clean you will still very likely get sick, for example. Would people in the past have understood that it was the water from the stream that made them sick? I think they normally would not have made the connection. It’s normal even now when people get ecoli or something from salad, to end up believing the cause was something else before it gets officially tracked down, because what actually happened didn’t match their expectations, they weren’t thinking about salad as a possibility. Our natural disgust for the most obvious signs of disease is woefully inadequate and does not at all translate directly into an accurate understanding of how disease works and why it happens.

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