The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

by Lindsey Fitzharris

Arrangements for the disposal of human waste were equally rudimentary before the passing of the Public Health Act in 1848, which established the centralized General Board of Health and initiated a sanitarian revolution. Before then, many streets in London were effectively open sewers, releasing powerful (and often deadly) amounts of methane. In the worst housing developments, lines of domiciles known as “back-to-backs” were separated only by narrow passageways four to five feet wide. Trenches brimming with piss ran down the middle. Even the increased number of water closets between 1824 and 1844 did little to solve the problem. Their construction forced landlords to hire men to remove “night soil” from overflowing cesspools in the city’s buildings. An entire underground army of “bone boilers,” “toshers,” and “mud-larks” developed to exploit the tide of human waste underneath the city. These scavengers—whom the author Steven Johnson calls history’s first waste recyclers—would pick through the thousands of pounds of garbage, feces, and animal corpses and then cart off these foul goods to market, where they could be reused by tanners, farmers, and other traders.