When sound scientific knowledge is not yet available, superstition and crackpot theories fill the gap. No matter how ridiculous the statement, there are always people dumb enough to believe it. Chiropracty, Aromatherapy, Aura Healing, and most of the products hocked in infomercials are all great examples of this stupidity.

Autism has been the favorite of the anti-vaccine group because it is unknown. We do not know what causes the disease. They can make outrageous claims about the disease and people don’t know enough to discern the lies. We also do not know the actual number of children affected by the disease. 20 years ago I’d never heard of the disease and now everybody knows a few people with it. The real number of cases is hidden behind the doctors following the current fad. A few years ago everybody had ADD. Now I don’t know many people with it anymore. Strange how that happened.

I think I ought to start a rumor that autism is caused by a combination of Twinkies and Pez. If either of the parents have eaten both of these within the 10 years of having a child the risk of autism increases by 50%.

        drbuzz0 said:

Yes, clearly many in centuries past realized it was dangerous and needed to be gotten rid of. However, I’d argue that not all appreciated just how important this was. Witness that in places like London, it was common to throw chamber pots into the street well into the 18th century.

Strictly speaking, this wasn’t so much because they didn’t understand that sewage was bad. It was a combination of the rapid and largely unplanned growth of London and various economic factors that made it impossible for many families to afford the services of a nightsoil man to clean out their cesspits. For instance, nightsoil men had to get rid of the waste somehow, and traditionally this was by sale to tanneries and farms. As London grew, these markets moved farther and farther away from the heart of the city, even as the quantity of nightsoil grew, and predictably, the nightsoil men began dumping it into the storm sewers, which drained directly to the Thames, and had to raise their fees because they couldn’t make as much money selling the waste, which meant that more households could not have their cesspits emptied and had to either start tossing the stuff out into the street or simply letting their cesspits overflow into the storm sewers. (At this time, the idea of a sanitary sewer was virtually unheard of; there was really only one kind of sewer, and indeed many cities built in this time frame still combine the sanitary and storm sewers to this day. It is, after all, very expensive to separate them if it wasn’t done at the outset.) The government really only took serious action after the Great Stink started to actually inconvenience Parliament itself.

There is a similar situation in overpopulated parts of Asia, where the authorities certainly understand the importance of sewage treatment (and, unlike Victorian England, understand *why* it is important) but can’t seem to bring themselves to actually do anything about it. Only part of this is down to money; another part is that the people who make the rules are generally not the ones adversely affected by a lack of proper sewage management, and this makes them less interested in solving the problem.

Essentially, although we say the word “theory” to mean “my idea of how things go,” that’s really a hypothesis. Germ “theory” is not someone’s idea of how things go. It’s just not perfect, and therefore not called a law, like we might call gravity, but a scientific theory has to have a good amount of proof behind it before it gets such a title. Can theories be proven wrong? Sure, but you need to have pretty solid proof to do it (just like many skeptics would require damn good evidence before accepting that ESP exists).

Great post. Keep up the good work.

Some popular theories on autism seem to be related to either the age of the parent or interactions with chemicals in the environment. “Chemicals in the environment” tends to imply chronic exposure to a toxin such as how lead can cause brain problems. It doesn’t generally mean “oh he took Aspirin once and just happened to get cancer three months later – Aspirin must be what gave him cancer, OMG!”
The sad thing is that no one has determined the exact reasons people get autism, unlike with systemic lead poisoning leading to retardation. There is no easy “fragile X” syndrome’s cause which is screenable. There are no extra copies of chromosomes to detect. It simply hits seemingly normal couple’s children, although there does seem to be increased odds in a family if an earlier child or relative has it. I had some signs of autism as a child but luckily for me, never to the extent of some of my friends in school.

        Calli Arcale said:

And that comes to one of the alternate theories of disease mentioned in the OP: foul smells. The technical term was “miasmas”, and for a long time, the germ theory warred specifically against the miasma theory of disease transmission. It was reasonable; people noticed since ancient times that stinkiness was often correlated with disease. People who lived in foul smelling swamps were more likely to contract malaria (which literally means “bad air”); draining the swamps relieved the odor and also was followed by a decline in malaria cases. Hey, bad air must really be what makes people sick! Well, no; the swamp just happened to be a breeding ground for mosquitos. The fact that it happened to smell bad was just a coincidence. (Although, one does wonder whether we evolved a dislike for such smells as a crude disease avoidance mechanism. It’s obviously not well enough developed to save us, but the dislike for stinkiness may help enough to make it adaptive.)

This relates to one of the points made in the OP, that sewage treatment was not performed prior to the discovery of pathogens. This is not true. Quite elaborate systems for removal of human waste have existed since antiquity. They just didn’t realize the reason why these were important. Part of it was aesthetic — like most animals, we instinctively dislike our waste and would generally prefer to see it gone. But part of it was disease control. They knew untreated sewage was bad. They didn’t know why; they though it was due to the stink. So more efforts revolved around putting it downwind than putting it downstream, with sometimes unfortunate consequences.

Yeah, thanks for correcting a few things there. You’re right about a number of things and one thing that can be noted here is that a theory can be useful and make accurate predictions even though it turns out to be totally wrong.

Bad smells, for example: Smelly decaying organic matter is a breeding ground for bacteria and human waste, which smells, also carries pathogens. Thus the actions that would remove these stinky materials would also reduce disease risks.

That said, some of these ideas could be useful at some times but could also cause harm in others. For example, one of the things that caused a lot of harm was that it was believed people should stay indoors with all the windows closed and shaded etc when they had something like the plague. The reason was that it would keep the “bad air” from getting in and making them sicker. Actually, this was horrible because it meant they got no fresh air and were left in a damp, dank enviornment where festering sores couldn’t heal and bacteria could easily grow.

Another idea was that bathing was unhealthy. It was thought that somehow bathing caused disease. Of course, this is not true. What they were observing was that those who bathed in contaminated water near cities or something got sick. Simple water borne illness. However, bathing in clean water, water which has been boiled or water which is from a clean spring away from a city is actually good for health. Poor hygiene increases the risk of infection.

When it comes to water: in many cultures it was believed that water was bad if it was left “stagnant” for too long and running water was considered “fresh.” Of course, water can stay in one place in a bottle for an infinite period of time if it’s sterile to begin with. What was observed is that if you keep water in one place and it’s not entirely sealed or something, then it can become a breeding ground for bacteria and it grows more and more foul.

It was thought that something like wine could “freshen” the water and restore it to a fresh, non-stagnant state. It worked okay in many cases, but it was not at all fool proof. The alcohol content of wine is up to 15%, so adding a splash of wine to some infected water does add some alcohol, but at that concentration and given the potency of alcohol as an antiseptic, it’s not going to be anywhere near 100% effective in killing everything. Certain strains of bacteria be reduced, but a little alcohol is not, by modern standards a way of making water safe.

Regarding sewage:

Yes, clearly many in centuries past realized it was dangerous and needed to be gotten rid of. However, I’d argue that not all appreciated just how important this was. Witness that in places like London, it was common to throw chamber pots into the street well into the 18th century.

The other problem was that being unaware of bacteria, they had no idea what made sewage unsafe and what could be done to remedy this. There wasn’t really “sewage treatment” so much as there was an effort to just get the sewage away from a city and usually that meant flushing out to sea or downstream on a river.

If you have a sewage system that flushes the sewage out away from a city, that’s certainly an improvement, but it doesn’t always work out that way. Communities down river can get hit for one thing, but even coastal cities are pretty limited if they’re on a slow-moving tidal river. Something like the Themes for example – that’s not going to flush out much. London had a big problem because unless you pipe the sewage miles out into open water, it’s just going to come back with the tide.

Just trying to get rid of sewage is of limited effectiveness. What needs to be done is treatment. Before germ theory we were pretty much flying blind on that one. Today sewage goes through stages of treatment which remove most of the sludge and then use “good” bacteria to digest and compost much of the material to reduce potential pathogens. The water goes through a series of steps which include treatment with things like chlorine and ozone.

I’d argue that something like mismania theory can indeed be helpful from time to time, but being fundamentally wrong, it can also lead you in the wrong direction. Foul smells are often associated with disease causing material, but not always. Adding some wine to water, might kill some pathogens, but it’s only partially effective. Removing sewage from a city might be somewhat helpful, but if you don’t disinfect it, you’re not doing the whole job. Free flowing running water may tend to be lower in contamination in general, but that’s definitely not a hard and fast rule.

We can’t rely on such hit-or-miss methods.

And that comes to one of the alternate theories of disease mentioned in the OP: foul smells. The technical term was “miasmas”, and for a long time, the germ theory warred specifically against the miasma theory of disease transmission. It was reasonable; people noticed since ancient times that stinkiness was often correlated with disease. People who lived in foul smelling swamps were more likely to contract malaria (which literally means “bad air”); draining the swamps relieved the odor and also was followed by a decline in malaria cases. Hey, bad air must really be what makes people sick! Well, no; the swamp just happened to be a breeding ground for mosquitos. The fact that it happened to smell bad was just a coincidence. (Although, one does wonder whether we evolved a dislike for such smells as a crude disease avoidance mechanism. It’s obviously not well enough developed to save us, but the dislike for stinkiness may help enough to make it adaptive.)

This relates to one of the points made in the OP, that sewage treatment was not performed prior to the discovery of pathogens. This is not true. Quite elaborate systems for removal of human waste have existed since antiquity. They just didn’t realize the reason why these were important. Part of it was aesthetic — like most animals, we instinctively dislike our waste and would generally prefer to see it gone. But part of it was disease control. They knew untreated sewage was bad. They didn’t know why; they though it was due to the stink. So more efforts revolved around putting it downwind than putting it downstream, with sometimes unfortunate consequences.

Lastly:

No person of Douglass’s era would ever look on the actions of the AVN with anything but horror and disdain.

I’m afraid this is not true. Antivaxxers go back quite a long ways — to before Douglass, in fact. Inoculation against smallpox was introduced to the West (from the Ottoman Empire, where it had been practiced for centuries) in 1718, and hopped the Atlantic to the American Colonies within a few years. It became very popular, but there were opponents even in the 18th Century. Voltaire wrote pro-inoculation pieces, chastising the anti-vaxxers of his day for opposing this lifesaving process. And that’s remarkable, considering that what they were opposing (inoculation with actual smallpox, vaccination with cowpox not being invented until 1796) was far more dangerous than what modern anti-vaxxers rail against.

So while most folks of Douglass time would support vaccination, there were those who did not, for various reasons. Some rejected the germ theory, usually in favor of miasmas. (Notably, some modern antivaxxers support the miasma theory, though it has evolved somewhat in the interim to be more about all manner of toxins than odors per se.)

        Franck said:

no efforts to disinfect drinking water? No way.

The usage of wine, beer, ale or cider can be traced back to several antic civilizations and was for a long time the primary way of drinking water (until they were gradually replaced first by tea and coffee and later by reliable tap water). There even is a roman text in which Gauls are described as alchoolics because they like to drink the wine pure instead of mixing it water.

That’s true, and for many centuries beer and wine was used instead of water, but they didn’t really understand why this was safer, only that it was observed that it was. It is still true that waterborne illness killed many. For one thing, adding some wine or cider, was not a powerful enough disinfectant to assure that contaminated water was always safe to drink.

If I remember correctly, one of the reasons that wine or cider or whatever was added to water was that it was believed that altering the taste was what made it safe.