1/4/2024 0 Comments Ohapi sickle cellThrough it all the fifty-three-year-old Benjamin Disraeli, chancellor of the Exchequer in Lord Derby’s reforming Tory government, toiled on, seeking passage of his Thames Purification Bill. I am being killed by inches.” Things were no better in Parliament, with many members decamping to the countryside, and even the stalwarts being forced on occasion to rush from the chambers, holding handkerchiefs over their noses. On June 16 the temperature in London broke all records, reaching 94.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade, and prompting a lawyer working at the Riverside Temple Bar to write, “The stench of the Temple to-day is sickening and nauseous in the extreme…. The full extent of Chadwick’s folly became evident in the summer of 1858, when unprecedented heat cooked the river into a putrescent stew that stunk so vilely it interrupted all nearby human activity. As a result, so great a volume of waste flowed into the river that the water drunk by Londoners was mixed with raw sewage. He had the city’s human effluent diverted into the sewers, which had been built to carry rainwater into the Thames. It was doubtless a messy process, but the solution implemented by the great sanitary crusader Edwin Chadwick in 1842 was, in the end, even worse. Prior to the 1840s the city’s 200,000 cesspools had provided some degree of sanitation, but they often overflowed, and they needed to be emptied by hand so that their contents could be transported out of the city and sold as fertilizer. By 1858 London had grown to be the largest city on earth, yet its nearly two and a half million inhabitants had no effective sewage system.
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