a book on henry 8th said that his future inlaws were encouraged to feed his future wife (then a child) alcohol because she’d need to drink a lot of it in England for safety reasons. Another book said England had a higher disease load because the relative protection of being an island let its cities grow larger (it was talking about industrialized England but the reasoning should have held earlier). It seems plausible this was a thing in England in particular, and our English-language sources conflated it with the whole world or at least all of Europe.
I am super curious to hear the disease rate of pre-mongol-destruction Baghdad.
Managed to find a source that gets into the topic.
Until the 19th century human beings in Western society considered water unsuitable for consumption. The very earliest historic societies, whether Egyptian, Babylonian, Hebrew, Assyrian, Greek or Roman, unanimously rejected water as a beverage. Through the ages water was known to cause acute and chronic but deadly illnesses and to be poisonous and therefore was avoided, particularly when brackish. The Old and New Testaments are virtually devoid of references to water as a common beverage as is the Greek literature, excepting some positive statements regarding the quality of water from mountain springs (Marcuse, 1899; Glen W. Bowersock, personal communication).
I don’t love that their citations are a personal communication and a source from 1899. No other sources for claims that the ancients rejected water as a beverage for safety reasons in this article. In History and epidemiology of alcohol use and abuse we again have similar uncited claims.
In traveling, local sources of water are always in question, and it is difficult or impossible to transport most other forms of liquids that are usually ingested, such as milk and juices.
Cholera is very much a disease of cities. Early humans were hunters, following the trail of game, Constant movement made it unlikely their exerements would contaminate the water supply. Later, as they became gatherers and remained in one place for long periods of time, the risk of polluting water became greater, but small settlements lessened the chances of drinking water contaminations. twas only when large numbers of people gathered together in confined spaces that the danger of thousands of untreated privies leaking into ground water or rivers led to the spread of cholera on an unprecedented scale, striking the rich and the poor, the famous and the obscure with equal virulence.
The book also talks about a description of Mary, Queen of Scots having a disease reminiscent of cholera. However, prior to the germ theory of disease, would people have really realized that a) drinking water was causing illness and b) the alcohol in fermented drinks could decontaminate the water and was therefore safe to drink?
As I scan books covering the history of drinking water and historical debates over the virtues of drinking water vs. alcohol, I am seeing that people had a variety of arguments for or against water. Alcoholic drinks were argued by some to promote normal health and development in children. A captive Frenchman said that in his country, only “invalids and chickens” drink water. I don’t see reports of a clear consensus among booze advocates in these papers and books that alcoholic beverages were to be preferred for their antiseptic properties. That seems to me to be reading a modern germ theory into the beliefs of people from centuries past.
I wouldn’t expect them to have full germ theory, but metis around getting sick after drinking bad water and that happening less often with dilute alcohol seems very plausible.
I wonder if there’s a nobility/prole distinction, in addition to the fact that we’re talking about a wide range of time periods and places.
Alcohol concentrations below 50% have sharply diminished disinfecting utility, and wine and beer have alcohol concentrations in the neighborhood of 5%. However, the water in wine comes from grapes, while the water in beer may have been boiled prior to brewing. If the beer or wine was a commercial product, the brewer might have taken extra care in sourcing ingredients in order to protect their reputation.
Beer and fungal contamination is a problem for the beer industry. Many fungi are adapted to the presence of small amounts of alcohol (indeed, that’s why fermentation works at all), and these beverages are full of sugars that bacteria and fungi can metabolize for their growth.
People might have noticed that certain water sources could make you sick, but if so, they could also have noticed which sources were safe to drink. On the other hand, consider also that people continued to use and get cholera from the Broad Street Pump. If John Snow’s efforts were what was required to identify such a contaminated water source with the benefit of germ theory, then it would be surprising if people would have been very successful in identifying delayed sickness from a contaminated water source unless the water source was obviously polluted.
An appeal to metis only seems to support the idea that people avoided drinking water to avoid getting sick if we also assume there were no safe water sources around, if this persisted long enough and obviously enough for people to catch on, and people saw no alternative but to give up on drinking water.
I also think it’s interesting that several religions have banned or discouraged alcohol consumption, and have also required or prohibited certain behaviors for reasons of hygiene, and yet, AFAIK, no religion has ever mandated that its followers drink alcohol and refuse water. Instead, we have numerous examples of religions promoting the consumption of water as more spiritual or healthful.
One factor to consider is that drinking alcohol causes pleasure, and pleasure is the motivation in motivated cognition.
Most comments on the internet are against any laws or technical measures that would prevent internet users from downloading for free copies of music and video files. I think the same thing is going on there: listening to music—music new to the listener particularly—causes pleasure, and that pleasure acts as motivation to reject plans and ways of framing things that would lead to less listening to novel music in the future.
OK, finally found the conduit to people who actually know what they’re talking about and have investigated this issue.
Paolo Squatriti is a rare writer (in Water and Society in Early Medieval Italy, AD 400-1000) to look at this question. He writes of both Italy and Gaul:
“Once they had ascertained that it was pure (clear, without odor, and cold) people in postclassical Italy did, in the end, drink water. Willingness to drink water was expressed in late antiquity by writers as dissimilar as Paulinus of Nola, Sidonius Apollinaris, and Peter Chrysologus, who all extolled the cup of water.”
In Misconceptions About the Middle Ages, Stephen Harris and Bryon L. Grigsby write: “The myth of constant beer drinking is also false; water was available to drink in many forms (rivers, rain water, melted snow) and was often used to dilute wine.” Steven Solomon’s Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization examines uses of water, including for drinking, going back to Sumeria.
a book on henry 8th said that his future inlaws were encouraged to feed his future wife (then a child) alcohol because she’d need to drink a lot of it in England for safety reasons. Another book said England had a higher disease load because the relative protection of being an island let its cities grow larger (it was talking about industrialized England but the reasoning should have held earlier). It seems plausible this was a thing in England in particular, and our English-language sources conflated it with the whole world or at least all of Europe.
I am super curious to hear the disease rate of pre-mongol-destruction Baghdad.
Managed to find a source that gets into the topic.
I don’t love that their citations are a personal communication and a source from 1899. No other sources for claims that the ancients rejected water as a beverage for safety reasons in this article. In History and epidemiology of alcohol use and abuse we again have similar uncited claims.
In Cholera: A Worldwide History:
The book also talks about a description of Mary, Queen of Scots having a disease reminiscent of cholera. However, prior to the germ theory of disease, would people have really realized that a) drinking water was causing illness and b) the alcohol in fermented drinks could decontaminate the water and was therefore safe to drink?
As I scan books covering the history of drinking water and historical debates over the virtues of drinking water vs. alcohol, I am seeing that people had a variety of arguments for or against water. Alcoholic drinks were argued by some to promote normal health and development in children. A captive Frenchman said that in his country, only “invalids and chickens” drink water. I don’t see reports of a clear consensus among booze advocates in these papers and books that alcoholic beverages were to be preferred for their antiseptic properties. That seems to me to be reading a modern germ theory into the beliefs of people from centuries past.
I wouldn’t expect them to have full germ theory, but metis around getting sick after drinking bad water and that happening less often with dilute alcohol seems very plausible.
I wonder if there’s a nobility/prole distinction, in addition to the fact that we’re talking about a wide range of time periods and places.
Alcohol concentrations below 50% have sharply diminished disinfecting utility, and wine and beer have alcohol concentrations in the neighborhood of 5%. However, the water in wine comes from grapes, while the water in beer may have been boiled prior to brewing. If the beer or wine was a commercial product, the brewer might have taken extra care in sourcing ingredients in order to protect their reputation.
Beer and fungal contamination is a problem for the beer industry. Many fungi are adapted to the presence of small amounts of alcohol (indeed, that’s why fermentation works at all), and these beverages are full of sugars that bacteria and fungi can metabolize for their growth.
People might have noticed that certain water sources could make you sick, but if so, they could also have noticed which sources were safe to drink. On the other hand, consider also that people continued to use and get cholera from the Broad Street Pump. If John Snow’s efforts were what was required to identify such a contaminated water source with the benefit of germ theory, then it would be surprising if people would have been very successful in identifying delayed sickness from a contaminated water source unless the water source was obviously polluted.
An appeal to metis only seems to support the idea that people avoided drinking water to avoid getting sick if we also assume there were no safe water sources around, if this persisted long enough and obviously enough for people to catch on, and people saw no alternative but to give up on drinking water.
I also think it’s interesting that several religions have banned or discouraged alcohol consumption, and have also required or prohibited certain behaviors for reasons of hygiene, and yet, AFAIK, no religion has ever mandated that its followers drink alcohol and refuse water. Instead, we have numerous examples of religions promoting the consumption of water as more spiritual or healthful.
huh, interesting. I wonder where the hell the common story came from.
One factor to consider is that drinking alcohol causes pleasure, and pleasure is the motivation in motivated cognition.
Most comments on the internet are against any laws or technical measures that would prevent internet users from downloading for free copies of music and video files. I think the same thing is going on there: listening to music—music new to the listener particularly—causes pleasure, and that pleasure acts as motivation to reject plans and ways of framing things that would lead to less listening to novel music in the future.
OK, finally found the conduit to people who actually know what they’re talking about and have investigated this issue.
Many other quotes from historical figures showing that water was a widely accepted and consumed beverage. I’m sold.