“It was the summer of 1880. It was August. It stank to high heaven. The sewers had been uncorked, and all the filth came out in a flood. All manner of waste was on display.”
So reads an article in the French daily newspaper Le Figaro. Purporting to be written by novelist and critic Émile Zola (though not written by him in actuality; Le Figaro merely copied his style), the piece references the Great Stink of 1880: a period from August to September when a horrific odor enveloped Paris and caused a panic about public health.
To a Parisian in 1880, a bad smell signified disease. Fears of an epidemic, groundless rumors of widespread death, and citizens’ protests spread throughout the city; in response, a government commission announced that “these odors [could] pose a threat to the public health.”
At the time of the Great Stink, fear of contamination overrode the newly developing tenets of germ theory in the public mind. It took the end of the Great Stink, with no deaths incurred, for Parisians to fully accept germ theory’s tenet “tout ce qui pue ne tue pas, et tout ce qui tue ne pue pas” ( “not everything that stinks kills, and not everything that kills stinks”). When another foul odor beset the city 15 years later, news coverage and public reactions treated the smell as a joke. Germ theory had taught them that an unpleasant smell alone was not a health hazard.
Developed, verified, and popularized between 1850 and 1920, germ theory holds that certain diseases are caused by the invasion of the body by microorganisms. Research by Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, and Robert Koch contributed to public acceptance of the once-baffling theory, proving that processes such as fermentation and putrefaction, as well as diseases such as cholera and tuberculosis, were caused by germs. And since the Great Stink was not accompanied by germs, it could not possibly start an epidemic.
Before germ theory was popularly understood, the methods taken to avoid illness and infection were based on guesses rather than facts. In ancient Rome, the association of illness with foul odors may have influenced the creation of a complex infrastructure intended to usher clean water into the city and stinky sewage out by way of separate pipelines. The ancient Roman writer Marcus Terentius Varro described his rudimentary—but not entirely far-fetched—understanding of how contamination occurred in Res Rusticae, published in 36 BCE:
Precautions must also be taken in the neighbourhood of swamps…because there are bred certain minute creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes, which float in the air and enter the body through the mouth and nose and there cause serious diseases.
Still, total lapses of sanitation were common. In the United States during the Civil War, severed limbs were allowed to pile up next to operating tables as doctors performed amputation after amputation; as late as the 19th century, physicians didn’t remove bloodstained clothing between one operation and the next. Hand washing was not a requirement in the hospital or in the home, and improper disposal of sewage resulted in the contamination of water used for drinking, cooking, and cleaning.
People ignorant of germ theory were not unconcerned with hygiene. They simply did not know the proper ways to protect themselves against germs. After germ theory’s development and popularization, effective sanitation practices resulted in cleaner homes, hospitals, and public spaces—as well as longer life spans for the people who had never before known how to avoid getting sick.