The Sanitary City by Martin Melosi, Johns Hopkins University Press,
£46.50/$59.95, ISBN 0801861527
A CENTURY ago, you wouldn’t have wanted to drink a glass of water in
Massachusetts. Its smell was so bad that, “it would be almost impossible to take
it as far as the mouth to taste it. Horses refused it at the street
watering-troughs, and the dogs fled from it”.
Most American cities sit on the coast or beside rivers and lakes, and for
much of the 19th century they poured raw sewage and rubbish straight into those
great bodies of water. Rapid urbanisation turned them into…
