this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2025
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i ... don't really think that "dirt floors" inherently are a problem. sanitation back then sucked but mostly for the cities between 1500 - 1800, because before then big cities weren't much of a thing and after that soap was invented. idk, maybe i am off about this. correct me if i am wrong.
(btw, does anybody know about the sanitary situation in ancient roman cities?)
but i agree with you.
Last time i went to the supermarket, i paid 18€ for a whole bag of food. it was more than enough for a whole day. When i thought how much i had to work for it to pay for it all, it's like 1.5 hours in total. That is not much. And the food is top quality. No toxins, rather fresh, very nutritious and very convenient to get everything in one place.
Soap was invented a long time ago - 2800 BC and the Romans made quite a bit of it. However it used lye so you wouldn't want to use it often.
The sanitation of Roman cities should have been pretty good by historical standards. Batthouses were common in the empire and people frequently visited them. Romans also had toilets with running water below them to take the waste away so in that regard they would have done much better than other societies.
The sewer system or lack thereof was the biggest sanitation issue for most historical cities. Back in the day it was difficult to create a sewer system since you need to minimize the slope at which the waste flows or else you have to do too much digging. Until Newton and Leibniz came around in the 1700s we didn't have calculus so you couldn't optimize a function mathematically and instead had to experimentally test it out. But, people didn't test things the way we do today - the scientific method was only formalized relatively recently as well. So this was more difficult to invent that you might think, and the invention has been lost several times over history.
Then once you figure out the minimum angle you have to discover a technique to dig at that angle. The simplest is to take two sticks and insert them into the ground, then tie a string between them that lies right on the ground. Then you can put the sticks this anywhere to see how deep you need to dig.
Since you mentioned 1500-1800, I'll mention that medieval London did NOT have a sewer system so people dumped their waste in the River Thames. Which is also where they got their drinking water. This led to the practice of putting a lemon wedge in your water glass since it helped mask the taste, which is one of my favorite historical trivia. Think on that the next time a restaurant puts lemon in your water.
thanks, this answer deserves an award
yeah, sanitation is really important, and it's easy to understand that once you consider that our shit is literally 25% live bacteria by mass. that's more than a trillion, idk even what the name for numbers that big is. for bacteria, the quantity of bacteria you ingest plays a role (i think) in how dangerous the disease is that you catch, so if you eliminate the biggest source of bacteria, that reduces diseases a lot
It might also be important to mention that history isn't a line up. Yeah sanitation was great in Rome, but it had taken a nose dive by the time the empire fell and the Dark Ages in Europe started.