About the Slums Around the World

About the Slums Around the World

For one thing the Romans weren't using their sewers the way Great Stink era London had begun to use sewers.

Really?

The trigger for the Great Stink was, amusingly, the introduction of a water closet that resembles modern toilets. ie what we'd think of as a step forward for hygiene - suddenly more and more Londoners were pouring vast quantities of polluted liquid into the system and it couldn't keep up.

Yup. But if you'll actually check the facts then you'll see that latrine systems have been found in many places, such as Housesteads, a Roman fort on Hadrian's Wall, in Pompeii, Herculaneum, and elsewhere that flushed waste away with a stream of water.

Disease caused by raw sewage getting into your fresh water supply is a problem that doesn't scale linearly. In a hamlet or village maybe once in a while somebody gets sick and people stop using a particular supply, in a small town it causes larger groups of people to get sick, a personal tragedy but it's still manageable. In cities it causes epidemics, overrunning public health agencies and leading to a population crash.

Right. The only problem: it explains why medieval towns were much smaller then Ancient Rome or today's cities, it does not explain why Ancient Rome and Industrialization Era London were able to solve this problem while medieval towns died off instead.