Modern Sanitation

In the late 19th century, Americans were still trying to figure out why they died of horrible diseases all the time. At this time, the idea of contagion was just beginning to gain acceptance, which would lead to radical changes that saved millions of lives. Still, others had different ideas. Some, despite as you will see below using the language of contagion, believed that sewer gas slipping into our homes was the reason for a number of diseases that of course have nothing to do with such a thing. Thus, here is a poem on the issue published in Modern Sanitation in 1885.

Our sanitation! Tis the art
Of filling up our homes with drains.
Ah! sewer-gas acts well its part
By conjuring up man’s aches and pains.

The beauteous scarlet fever skips
With typhoid hand in hand.
While sweet Diptheria gayly trips
O’er stationary washstand.

The cholera doth laugh to see
Its comma bacilli.
Old dysentery’s microbe
Is out upon the fly.

Malaria with its poisonous dart
Lurks ‘neath the water-trap.
Measles upon its round doth start,
Small-pox wakes from its nap.

The crafty plumber makes his bill
The sewer-gas ascends.
The doctors gives a sugar pill
‘Tis thus we lose our friends.

The undertaker says ‘tis well
The funeral corteges pass.
The letters of the tombstone spell
Hic Jacet, Sewer-Gas.

Gilded Age Americans, capitalist, anarchist, or middle class reformer, loved putting statements in rhyme. These beliefs about sewer gas would be powerful until World War I .

I found the poem in Suellen Hoy’s Chasing Dirt, p. 70-71