MARY QUITE CONTRARY - ONE

 

I doubt you have ever heard of George Soper, but he is the perfect example of the ways that new technology and new ways of thinking provide an opportunity for an individual to achieve wealth and fame. George was born in 1870 in New York City, just as the population was exploding, and people were noticing that it was not a very healthy place to live. 

Each year one out of every 36 people in New York City died of disease or accident. In Boston and Philadelphia the rate was one out of every 44. The rate for London and Paris was one out of every 40. The natural question was why the death rate varied at all. No one had ever asked that before, scientifically.  So George did.

George A. Soper (above) graduated from Columbia University in 1899 with a doctorate in the new field of “civil” engineering. He was described as a man of “average build, high wide forehead and hooded eyes that seem foreboding,” which I suppose came from staring down disaster day after day.

On 8 September, 1900 , when a category 4 Hurricane leveled Galveston Island, Texas and killed one third of the human population, one of the unsung heroes was 30 year old Dr. George Soper. He saved thousands of lives in Galveston by quickly redesigning and installing a new municipal water system and preventing the predicted typhoid epidemic which normally followed natural disasters. 

In 1903 he helped stop a typhoid epidemic in Ithaca that had killed 82 in just two months, and then stopped another typhoid outbreak in Watertown, New York. In 1904 he turned his attention to the death rate in New York City.

George was hired by the Department of Health, and tasked with answering a basic question; what happens to all that human waste dumped into the Hudson and East Rivers? Conventional wisdom was that it all floated out to the ocean. But by releasing floats into the rivers and tracking their journeys over three years, George came to the stunning realization that because of their width and the tides, neither the Hudson or the East River actually flows very much out to sea.  

The floats meandered back and forth for weeks before eventually escaping into the bay.  Since the river did not flush itself, it was not a very good toilet. As George explained to the New York Times, “…immense quantities of poisonous sewage floats for days in the river and bays close to public baths, bathing beaches and the oyster beds of Jamaica Bay, from which 1 million bushels are brought to New York markets every year.” (p. 20, NYT March 14, 1911 Sports) George was obviously preparing the public for the expense of building a new sewage system.

George knew there would be resistance.  “No new taxes!” is not a new battle cry. And he knew opponents to the expense would be nit-picking every word he said. And if you listened carefully you could hear Dr. Soper soften his absolutes, even in that same interview with the Times. 

He continued, “Only recently there was an outbreak of typhoid at the Rockaway Peninsula…In one case we traced the oysters to a dealer who was to have put them into fresh water before selling them. We could not assertion whether or not he kept his promise…”  In other words, George knew the sewage was killing people but he did not yet have the individual case histories or the laboratory work that would establish it to a scientific certainty. 

And that was why, when landlord George Thompson asked Dr. Soper to investigate a single outbreak of typhoid in a  house he was renting in Oyster Bay, Long Island, Dr. Soper jumped at the chance.  

Banker Charles Warren and his family had rented the Thompson guest house (above)  for the summer. On Sunday, 27 August, 1911, one of the Warren daughters had suddenly developed a fever of 105 degrees F, a headache, diarrhea, nausea and a heavy cough.  When she also developed a skin rash a local doctor diagnosed her with typhoid fever.  Quickly Mrs. Warren, a second daughter, two maids and the gardener also came down with the fever.  A Board of Health investigator quickly ascribed the source to a contaminated water supply, but the Thompson family drank from the same supply and they were all fine. Mr. Thompson was convinced the cause could not be the water, in part because, if it was, he would have a very hard time renting that house again.

Dr. Soper agreed with Mr. Thompson, and began his own investigation, but this time in New York City where he intensively interviewed the Warren family in their own home. George had noted that there were eleven people in the Warren household that summer, but only six had developed typhoid. What was different about those six people? What had they done that the five other occupants had not done? Eventually, after hours of interviews, the family remembered a special treat they had eaten for desert one night; peaches. George realized now he had to locate the cook who had washed those peaches, even though everyone was certain, she had not developed typhoid fever.

All the family knew about her was that she was Irish, was middle aged, had dark hair, and was named Mary. She had been provided by an employment agency, which had checked her letters of reference but had not kept them. So George found himself tracking “Mary” the cook through other servants used by the same agency. 

He ran into suspicion and secrecy, and had to travel to Boston and back, but eventually he discovered that her name was Mary Mallon, and she had cooked for seven families over the last seven years. In those families 22 people had developed typhoid fever, and one young girl had died. Soper was now certain he had found a carrier for typhoid, something that been only a theory up to then; Which explains why Dr. Soper was so excited when he found Mary, working as a cook for Mr. Walter Bowen and his family, on Park Avenue.

Soper appeared before Mary (above) in the Bowen kitchen and,, according to himself,  "I was as diplomatic as possible, but I had to say I suspected her of making people sick and I wanted specimens of her urine, feces and blood.”  Sounds very diplomatic to me.  Mary would later claim that Soper also told her he was going to write a book about her and offered to split the royalties with her. But whether such a deal was offered or not, Mary’s reaction was swift and definitive. According to Soper, “She seized a carving fork and advanced in my direction.” Soper says he ran from the house, feeling lucky to have escaped.

And to be honest, I do not blame Mary Malone. A strange man has approached her and asked for a sample of her bodily fluids. And worse, he had then accused her of being a typhoid Mary; in fact, the original Typhoid Mary.

- 30 – 

CHRISTMAS TAKE TWO

 

I'll bet darn few of you know that this year Christmas comes on Thursday, 7 January.  This is good news if you don't think you can wait for Sunday, 25 December 2022. But at the moment I am  

speaking of the  “original Christmas, the one 200 million Greek and Russian Orthodox Christians celebrate, 13 days after Catholics and Protestants make merry. Now, as to why there are two Christmases, well, that has to do with the way theology seems to have been invented specifically to start arguments. So let me start this argument at it's beginning.

The first successful calendar that we know of was adopted over 6,500 ago by the 18 amalgamated city-states we know as the Sumerians. Being farmers they started their year in the spring, with each of their months beginning with sunset on the night of the new moon. This lunar calendar proved so popular it was adopted with slight modifications by everybody, including a small group of highland Semitic sheep herders known to themselves as the Yehudi – modern English translation being “the Jews”.

The Jewish spring was marked by the birthing of their sheep, what they called the Pesach. Fourteen days into the first Hebrew month of Nisan, at the full moon, they drained the blood of one of their first born kids. That's a baby sheep. The body was then burned, the rising smoke being offered up as a sacrifice to their god Elohim or Yahweh, to ensure he would keep them in milk, wool and lamb chops for the coming year. But, just about the same time as the invention of the calendar, the flocks of many of these Hebrews started dying.

Maybe it was disease and maybe a drought, but these Jewish bands were reduced to seeking work around the Egyptian settlements in the Nile river delta, where they were forced to exchange their Sumerian lunar calendar for an Egyptian solar one, and their mutton for bread. And the first Egyptian bread grain which ripened each spring, about the Nisan full moon, was barley. Now, barley doesn't rise well with yeast. This meant that every spring, when the stockpiles of wheat and rye grains ran short, the Jews were reduced to eating the hard, flat, unleavened bread. After leaving Egypt, or, as the religious fanatics described it, “escaping”, the spring Pesach was relabeled the Passover Festival.

Over the next  couple of millennial the Jews established a homeland called Israel, where they were  attacked by the Philistines, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Akkadians, the Hittites, and eventually the Romans. Every new conqueror forced the Hebrews to adopt some of their culture and calendar. 

And as is common with occupied people, the common folk dreamed of a messiah or Christ, who would save them from their oppressors, foreign and Jewish. Over time this produced a seemingly endless stream of messiah candidates. Most were loonies, and many could be bought off. But a few were idealistic and dangerous enough that the upper crust Jewish Pharisees felt forced to eliminate them. And it was because of those few that before we got two Christmases, we got two Pesach-es – later renamed Easter.

See, the Romans, who were occupying Israel in the first century, had just switched over to a combination solar and lunar calendar championed by Julius Caesar and enacted on The Kalend, or the first morning of the new month of January, 47 B.C.E.  By Roman law all debts and taxes were paid on the Kalend, including the Temple Tax the Jews paid so they would be excused from sacrificing to the Roman gods.

This Temple Tax was paid to the Roman Governor in the capital of Jerusalem, a city of between 60 and 70,000 people. During Passover, the city had to accommodate another 5 to 10,000 pilgrims in town to sacrifice at their temple. This produced a lot of taxable income for everybody, but with a crowd that large, you were guaranteed at least one Christ-wanna-be a year. 

Which is why, the Christian holy book could be very specific about the date when the most successful Christ, Jesus ben Joseph of Nazareth, was nailed to a cross. He was killed, theologians now figure, about 3:00pm on Friday in the 33^rd year of the common era,   or about 3 hours before the start of Passover that year.  Except killing this Christ only added to the Pharisse's problems.

These Christians kept insisting their dead guy was The Christ sent to reform Judaism which pissed off the Pharisee, who  saw no reason to reform a religion they were running.   Also, all reformers made the Romans nervous, which pissed off the Pharisee even more. A decade after Jesus' crucifixion, the Jewish King Agrippa beheaded the cult's new leader, the Apostle James. 

The next leader, also named James but called "The Just" to separate him from James the dead,  tried to avoid giving the Pharisee any reason to cut off any more heads by strictly obeying Mosaic law for 20 years. However, the Pharisee eventually decided to kill James the Just anyway. So they threw him off the Temple roof. And when that didn't kill him, they had him beaten to death.

But there were other, even more disruptive zealots around, and in the year 66 C.E., bad Roman government and all these revolutionaries set off the First Jewish war, which lead to the Kitos War and then the Bar Kokhba revolt, which ended in 136 C.E. 

This 80 years of violence so pissed off the Romans they destroyed the Jewish temple, then burned and sacked the entire city of Jerusalem, and then outlawed Judaism entirely. The only way for Christianity to survive this Roman repression was to form their own religion, adopting the Julian calendar and inventing a new theology as they went along.

As figured by Professor Rodney Stark, of Baylor College, devotees of Christianity surpassed the “symbolically weighty figure” of 100,000 worshipers attending a hundred or so churches about the year 200 C.E., or 70 years after the last Jewish revolt. And yet, already, their new theology was starting to encounter problems. 

In the year 189 C.E., Rome, received a new bishop, or elder of this new quasi-Jewish church. We know him only by the name of Victor, and that he came from North Africa -  perhaps he was a Berber. We can assume Victor was devout, but we know he also was combative and arrogant. First, he had started calling himself “the Pope”. And secondly, was the way he tried to handle the Quarterdecimani debate.

In plain English, it was “The 14” - as in the 14^th day of Nissan, i.e. the date of Passover. Less than fifty years after the death of Jesus, Polycarp, the Bishop of Smyrna, reminded his fellow Christians that the Paesch was a life giving festival well before it became the Jewish Passover. 

This made 16 Nisson - the second day after Passover – the perfect day to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Which meant the common folk still had to know when Passover started. And Polycarp had been personally trained by the Apostle John, who had personally known both the living and the resurrected Jesus.  So, he ought to know when Jesus died and rose from the dead -at least to within a day or two.

But Victor and most western Bishops wanted to disconnect Christianity from Passover. Too Jewish, you know. That meant converting Jesus ben Joseph into a gentile, like the majority of the new Christian recruits. This was why the Sabbath was moved from the Jewish Friday at sunset and all day Saturday – the end of the week – to Sunday – the beginning of the week. And by using the Julian calendar, which most gentiles were familiar with, they could reenact the mystical Good Friday to Resurrection Sunday, every year. And that was something the “floating” Jewish Passover, which could come on any day of the week, and was favored by the eastern Christians, could not do.

So far, settling such theological issues had followed the example of the Pauline Epistles. The bishops exchanged letters arguing their case, until they were close to agreement. They then held conferences, called synods, which endorsed the new dogma. But bishops still within the Byzantine Empire, who spoke and read Greek, felt as qualified to determine dogma as the upstart Latin speakers from Rome. 

But Pope Victor, a Latin speaker,  now abruptly warned that any Christians who did not sever the direct connection between Passover and Easter would be excommunicated - thrown out of the church and denied Jesus' forgiveness.

Immediately a missive arrived from the proud Bishop of Ephesus. This was a large, wealthy city, so when Bishop Polycrates spoke, other Christians paid attention. He reminded Victor that many respected church leaders celebrated Easter on 16 Nisson, like, “...Philip, one of the twelve apostles....(and) John, who was both a witness and a teacher...and Polycarp in Smyrna...” and the seven bishops in his own family. Polycrates warned Victor. “ I...am not frightened by terrifying words.”

Another dissent arrived from the Bishop of Lyon, France. Irenaeus was a Greek who had a strong record opposing “Judaizing” the new faith, which gave him street cred in this argument. Irenaeus cautioned Victor against asserting dominance, because that might start a civil war within the Church. Finally, Victor backed down. 

So,  for the next 800 years, everybody agreed to disagree on the date for Easter and about the power of one Bishop, whatever he called himself, to dictate to other Bishops. The eastern church read their liturgy in Greek, the Romans in Latin. And this divided church survived the fall of the western Roman empire and the rise of Islam, until 1053 C.E., when another hot head was elevated to Pope.

In that year, “Pope” Leo IX went nuclear on a small group of Greek Orthodox churches in southern Italy. Leo ordered them to either “conform” to the Latin Easter or close their doors. 

In Constantinople, the Ecumenical Patriarch, head of the local churches, Micheal I Cerularius, retaliated by dropping the same bomb on the Latin churches in his city.  And his city was far bigger than Rome.

The following year, 1054, Cardinal Humbert, led a Papal delegation to Constantinople to insist that Micheal reopen the Latin churches and acknowledge Leo IV as the supreme leader of the “Catholic”, meaning unified, church.

Oddly enough, Micheal said no.  Whereupon, everybody in sight excommunicated everybody else in sight. This exchange of “Ex” bombs escalated until it widened into the Great Schism, which has divided Christianity ever since. The two sides stopped talking to each other. The Latin churches continue to celebrate Easter on the first Sunday after the Paesch full moon, while the Greek Churches mark Christ's rising three days after Passover, whatever the day of the week that fell on.

A final bit of confusion was added in 1582, when Pope Gregory XIII introduced a new and refined calendar, which cut that year by 10 days. Initially it was recognized only in Catholic states. Protestant Britain did not make the switch until 1752, by which time the difference between the Julian and the newer Gregorian calendars had grown to 11 days. Russian did not accept the change until the revolution, in 1918, by which time the shift was 13 days. They were followed later by most secular governments.

But the Greek Orthodox Church, still pissed off about the Great Schism, have remained on the Julian calendar. Which is why we have two Easters, and why the Eastern Orthodox Christmas comes on  25 December, Julian Calendar, but actually falls on 6 January, under the Gregorian calendar – 13 days later. Which gives us two Christmases.

The Jews, of course, have stubbornly stuck to their own clock, insisting the year 2022 is actually the year 5782. And that....is a story for another time.

- 30 -

TOILET HUMOR Chapter Six

 

I have learned that whether your story is considered a drama or a tragedy is often determined by where you chose to end it. Consider the tale of the Great Stink of 1857, which concluded with the construction of the London sewers, conquering cholera and typhus by pumping the fecal focus eastward to the Thames estuary. It was for the 19^th century Londoner a glorious conclusion, the return to the Garden of Eden toilet – flushed out of sight, out of mind. 

But a mere 50 years (1907ish)  later there was so much human crap in the estuary, it was beginning to stink up the entire North Sea.  And a nation that lived on fish and chips began to worry their story might yet turn into a Media. But England – and the human world - was offered salvation when the British East India Company moved their headquarters from Calcutta to the west coast of the subcontinent.

Over sixty years, beginning in 1687, the civil servants of the British Raj used native labor to transform seven islands into a new city and port, built and organized to English standards, and overwhelmingly occupied and operated by Indians. 

By 1890 Bombay was a metropolis of almost a million inhabitants. To Mr. C. Carkeet James, Chief Drainage Engineer for the Metropolitan District, there were “...few if any cities in India of greater interest or higher educational value to students of sanitation.” Along Bombay's wide boulevards and narrow winding streets, trained English soldiers and engineers rubbed shoulders with a rising Indian middle class and uneducated textile workers, and even afflicted beggars. And it was the latter who inspired the so called Lepers Acts.

By the end of the 20^th century we realized the only way to contract leprosy is to be in the 5% of the population with the genetic defect that makes you vulnerable to the bacteria leprea or lepromatosis. But as late as the end of the 19^th century, leprosy was still one of humanities' most feared infections. Seemingly at random, perfectly healthy individuals would suddenly display skin lesions, which gave the disease its Latin name, lepra or “scaly”. 

The illness progressively destroyed the nervous system. Extremities would lose feeling. Injuries went unnoticed and untreated, often leading to the loss of toes and fingers, even ears and noses. Most suffers eventually became blind. Long before then, the afflicted were expelled from their communities, unwanted and considered unclean, drawn to the cities where they could survive only by begging.

Under the various Lepers Acts all sufferers in Bombay were prohibited from handling “any article of food or drink or any drugs or clothing intended for human use, bathe, wash clothes or take water from any public well or tank...drive (or)...ride in any public carriage.” 

Thus ostracized, most lepers were reduced to starvation, and local police were empowered to arrest “without a warrant any person who appears...to be a pauper leper.” What else were they to be? But a journal at the time, “One of the results has been to free the city of Bombay from the beggars who used to extort alms by the exhibition of their sores about the public buildings, schools, water tanks, etc.”

Mitigating its cruelty, the act also ordered the creation of leper colonies, where an infrastructure of professionals could feed and clothe the afflicted - “chiefly vagrants and beggars”. 

And in typical Victorian fashion, the staff also tended to their moral shortcomings by providing work that gave them a sense of dignity and helped to mitigate the expense of their care and feeding. 

In 1890, in the Matinga section of Bombay , the recently abandoned quarters of an artillery battery, were converted into leper colony dormitories (above). The barracks stood on thick concrete foundations, raising it above the monsoon season mud and filth. The dormitories for the patients were outfitted with running water, a kitchen and mess rooms.

At the end of May 1891 Mr. W.M. Acworth, local Commissioner for the Metropolitan Asylums Board, informed his sponsors back in England, “With accommodation for 190, I had yesterday 226 inmates, but fortunately a new ward has just been completed, and this over crowding will temporarily cease, though only temporarily. If I had room for 500 I could fill the asylum in a week.” In not much longer than that, maximum capacity was reached, 68% male, 32% female, and about 40 children. But the corporation that governed Bombay resisted fully funding the colony. 

The first year's monsoon caused the colonies' cesspits to over flow, and the flood of fecal waste from the lepers alarmed the surrounding population. By May of 1892 “The Times of India” observed, “ The Matinga Asylum is seriously overcrowded with lepers... (because of a) lack of rupees...land for the extension of the asylum lie still idle... Unless something is done to remedy this state of things, our streets will again be overrun with homeless lepers, and Mr. Acworth’s labors in the cause of these afflicted people will practically be brought to naught.”

Public and political pressure forced the East India Company to open its purse. With acquisition of the additional land, and additional funding, Mr. Acworth turned to the chief drainage engineer, Mr. James (above, standing, 2nd from left) for a solution to the colonies' cesspit problem . What Mr. C.C. James built was a chemical-mechanical stomach to re-digest the human waste, much the same way a cow's multiple stomachs re-digests their feed.

First, Engineer James built several enclosed 19,000 gallon (settling) tanks. Here the solids sank to the bottom, where the oxygen loving (or aerobic) bacteria converted the poop into a black sludge, and pooped out their own waste, carbon dioxide. This bubbled to the surface, forming a scum which was periodically skimmed off. 

When the slowing production of scum indicated the aerobic bacteria had eaten themselves to death, the oxygen depleted sludge was pumped uphill into one of several air tight septic tanks, where the slow anaerobic (oxygen hating) digestion began.  An American engineering journal cheerfully explained the processes, as if in a new car brochure. “The anaerobic bacteria are provided along with the sewage and practically no difficulty arises in retaining their services on the works beyond providing them with space and time in which to carry out their labors.” 

Their work of reducing the sludge could take up to six weeks at an ambient temperature of between 78 and 90 degrees Fahrenheit, all the while pooping out methane gas. And this was where Mr C. Carkeet James showed his engineering skills.

At the Matinga colony the methane was captured, and fed to 3 horsepower 4-stroke methane gas motors (above) designed by German engineer Nikolaus August Otto. The Otto engines required 22 cubic feet of methane per hour to power the pumps which slowly raised the sludge the 8 feet between the settling pools and the anaerobic tanks. As figured by engineer James, each patient produced 3 – 4 cubic feet of methane per day, meaning that on a good day each engine needed 7 to 8 patients visiting the latrine for each hour of pumping – a goal easily met. In fact, so much methane was produced the engines could also provide electricity to light the dormitories.

After 6 – 8 weeks each anaerobic tank was left with a bottom layer of carbon heavy sludge covered by “gray water” - clean but not pure enough for human consumption. The sludge was compressed and used for land fill. 

The “gray water” was allowed to cascade down hill, during which it was aerated again, and used to irrigate and fertilize the colony's 6 acre farm. 

The workers were patients/inmates, who were 84% Hindu vegetarians – and 9% Muslim and 10% Christians. Besides feeding themselves, the bumper crops were sold, and, according to Mr. Acworth, “Profits from the farm wholly maintain 50 lepers located therein”. In 1904 the colony was renamed the Acworth Leper Asylum, and after World War Two, the Acworth Hospital. It still operates in modern Bombay, renamed Mumbi.

The process was not self supportive, but was publicly heralded as an example for the world. But the world did not beat a path to the lepers' back door. It was still cheaper to just dump your poop in the nearest river or bay, even when it occasionally washed right back into your front yard. It was not until the middle of the 20^th century that many in the industrialized world began to realize that the Garden of Eden toilet has always been a myth.

According to the World Health Organization, exposure to human waste kills a child somewhere every 20 seconds - 1.4 million dead children each year - “more than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined”. 

Of the world's 7 billion human beings, over 2 ½ billion are still living surrounded by their own (200 million tons of) poop. World wide, according to author and sanitation authority Rose George, 20% of girls drop out of school because they have no safe place to relieve themselves. “Providing a latrine can mean the difference between illiteracy and education.” 

Providing every human being with a way to treat, clean and reuse even a high percentage of their poo, would not make humanity self supporting. But it would be a step in the right direction.  And in the long run, cheaper than pretending we can clean up our mess by pretending it isn't really there. 

It is true that shit happens. But it is not true that you just have to live with it. Because in the case of our own shit, we can't.

- 30 -