Episode 091 - More on Magnetism, and Introduction To Disease And Plagues
Date: 10/04/21
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2216-episode-ninety-one-more-on-magnetism-and-introduction-to-disease-and-plagues/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”The episode covers Book 6, lines 1002–1125. Don is back and Joshua returns as well, giving the panel its full strength of four. The first half covers Lucretius’s particle-based explanation of how magnets attract and repel iron — Martin notes that a static magnetic field is better described today by field theory than by particle flows, but acknowledges the complementarity of models and agrees with Rolfe Humphries that Lucretius’s explanation is “an ingenious tour de force.” Discussion also covers the word “lodestone” (middle English for “leading stone”), Samothracian iron rings, the alloy electrum, and the distinction between soldering and welding.
The second half covers Lucretius’s introduction to diseases and plagues. He correctly identifies waterborne and airborne transmission vectors but is wrong about miasma (bad air) as a cause. Joshua tells the story of the Great Stink of London in 1858 and John Snow’s epidemiological tracing of cholera outbreaks to contaminated wells — work that went unrecognized in his lifetime but that, combined with Pasteur’s later discoveries, finally displaced miasma theory. Don’s closing observation: what always impresses him about Lucretius is his powers of observation and the humanizing way he conveys those observations within a metrical structure.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to Episode 91 of Lucretius Today. I’m your host Cassius, and together with my panelists from the EpicureanFriends.com forum, we’ll walk you through the six books of Lucretius’ poem and we’ll discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. We encourage you to study Epicurus for yourself and we suggest the best place to start is the book Epicurus and His Philosophy by Canadian professor Norman DeWitt. For anyone who is not familiar with our podcast, please visit EpicureanFriends.com where you’ll find our goals and our ground rules. If you have any questions about those, please be sure to contact us at the Forum for more information.
In this episode 91, we’ll read approximately Latin lines 1002 through 1125 from Book 6 and we’ll discuss the details of how magnets work and then shift to preliminary comments about diseases and plagues. We’re happy to say that Don is back with us this week and Joshua is here too, so our panel is once again back to full strength. Now let’s join Don reading today’s text.
Don:
And first, many seeds or effluvia are continually flying off from the stone and by their blows disperse and drive away the air that lies between the magnet and the iron. This space being empty and void made between, the corpuscles of the iron rush out suddenly in a train all linked together into this vacuum, so that the whole body of the iron ring to which they are joined immediately follows. For nothing is made up of seeds more entangled and connected together than the cold and tough substance of iron, and therefore, as we said before, it is less to be wondered if the seeds cannot fly off from the iron into the void, but those before must draw on those behind, and the whole ring follows at last, which it does and continues to move till it comes close to the stone and, fixed by secret bonds, sticks to it.
And these effluvia of the iron that light nearest the stone rush into the void every way, upwards or across, wherever the space is empty, for they are driven by the force of other seeds, nor have they any power to move upwards by their own natural motion. You may add another reason to account for this experiment, which is that the iron is driven forward and assisted in its motion from without, from the air before the steel being more rare and the space between more empty and void than it was. Hence it is that the air that is behind strikes upon the back of the ring and drives and forces it on, for the air that surrounds all bodies beats upon them with continual blows, but that only it drives on the iron where the space is empty on that side and fit to receive it. The air therefore, entering into the many pores of the iron and subtly conveying itself into the little passages, thrusts and forces it on, as a ship is driven by wind and sails. And then all things must contain within some parts of air, for all bodies are rare and full of pores and air surrounds and pierces through everything. This air therefore that lies concealed in the body of the iron is always tossed with violent motion and beats upon the ring and agitates it within, and so the iron is carried on toward the void to which it was moving and whither all its force was first directed.
But sometimes the substance of the iron will fly from the magnet — it will withdraw sometimes as well as press towards it. For I have seen little Samothracian rings of iron and filings of steel put into a brazen pot, and the stone being applied to the bottom of the vessel, the iron will leap and dance upwards, so eager it is to be gone and avoid the stone. This great aversion rises from the interposition of the brass. For when the particles of the brass have entered and filled up the open pores of the iron, then come the effluvia of the lodestone, and finding the passages of the iron full and no more open for them to pierce through as before, they beat upon the bits of iron and drive them forward with all their force, and thus the particles of the stone, passing through the brass, throws the iron from it, which otherwise it would take to its embrace.
Do not be surprised to find that the effluvia of the stone do not drive away other bodies from it in the same manner. For some remain unmoved on account of their weight — gold is of this sort. Others because they are rare and their pores are wide, so that the particles that fly off from the stone pass through without touching and therefore can have no power to move them. Of this kind is the texture of wood. The nature of iron is placed between these two, and when its pores are full of those brazen particles, then it is that the effluvia of the magnet beat upon it and drive it off.
Nor is the friendship between the lodestone and the steel so singular a case. I can produce instances of many things whose natures are peculiarly fit and suited to each other. And first, you observe that stones are cemented together only by lime, and boards are so joined together by glue made of the ears and hooves of bulls that the solid wood of a table will sooner split than the strong joints of glue will start or fall asunder. Wine will mingle with spring water when heavy pitch and smooth oil will not. The purple color of the murex incorporates so into the body of wool that it never can be taken out — no, not if you strive to recover it to its native whiteness by all the waves of the sea, not if you wash it in all the water of the ocean. There is but one material that will solder gold to gold together. Brass is joined only by white lead. How many things of this nature might be produced? To what purpose? I would by no means lead you so far out of the way, or give myself so much trouble in such inquiries — I have many things yet to explain, but I shall be as short as possible.
Those things whose textures so mutually answer to one another, that the cavities of this thing agree with the plenitudes of that and the cavities of that with the plenitudes of this, may be conjoined most easily and in the strictest manner. And some things may be so joined to others as if they were fastened together by hooks and rings. And in this manner it is that the lodestone seems to be connected to the steel.
Now I shall teach from whence diseases spring, and whence arise the pestilential blasts that spread their deadly poison and destroy both man and beast. And first, as I have said, the seeds of many things are ever flying through the air — some are sound and vital to mankind, and others bring on disease and death. These, when they arise and taint the sky, the air becomes infected. Now the morbid force of all diseases, every pestilence, comes either from without, as clouds and mists from the heavens above, or rises from the earth itself when, drenched by fierce and unseasonable showers and pierced by the sun’s scorching beams, it sends unwholesome vapors through the air.
Have you not seen that those who search out foreign lands and leave their country and their native homes contract new pains from the strange water and the air they breathe? The mighty difference of the air occasions this. For don’t you think the air of Britain is widely different from the air of Egypt, where the North Pole is never seen? Or that the air of Pontus differs from that of Gades and Ethiopia, where the black race of men are thoroughly sodden with the sun’s heat? The four quarters of the air, we may suppose, are different in their temper and quality, because they are opposed to the four quarters of the earth, where men in every region widely disagree in face and complexion and are tormented with diseases peculiar to the countries where they live. The leprosy was known first in Egypt near the river Nile and nowhere else. The Athenians are tortured with the gout, the Achaeans with sore eyes — so every country is an enemy to one part and member of the body or other, and this must be imputed to the air.
And when the morbid pestilential air of a country remote from us moves from its first abode and the fatal vapor begins to advance, it creeps first by degrees like a cloud or mist and disturbs and changes everything as it goes. And when it comes to the climate where we live, it corrupts everything and makes it like itself, and therefore is deadly and destructive to us. This wasting plague, these sad infectious blasts, fall either in the water or fix upon the fruits or other food of men or on the provender of cattle, or they may hang suspended in the air above, so that when we draw our breath we needs must suck this poison mingled with it into our bodies. In the same manner the pestilence seizes on the cattle and the contagion infects the sheep. The danger is the same whether we change our climate and travel into a country where the air is pernicious to us, or whether nature of its own accord brings the cruel infection from abroad or introduces a disease we are not used to, which upon its first approach may prove hurtful to us.
Cassius:
Don, it’s good to have you back, and thank you for reading that text today. We have a full-strength panel with four of us here today so hopefully we’ll have a lot of good comments about this section. Before we jump into the details, it would probably be best to set the stage again in general. Like everything in Lucretius, we are looking for natural explanations that explain how things work without resorting to any kind of supernatural explanation, and today it looks like we’re focusing on the operation of magnets and then disease and how disease can spread through the air.
I would say what we’re talking about again is sort of an action-at-a-distance situation. I remember last week I made the comment that the description of magnetism seemed to be relatively decent to me, and now as we listen to it today I know we have serious issues in terms of how modern science would agree or disagree — but I think I will still defend in a very general way that Lucretius is explaining both magnetism and the transmission of disease as a result of particles moving through the air. I’m very interested to hear what Martin is going to have to say about how magnets work and how this description fits. But it does seem to me as a general layman who’s taken some interest in science that magnets probably do work to some degree because of the interaction of the multitude of particles that are constantly flowing around them, through them, and through everything. He’s explaining the attraction and repelling nature of magnetism and by connecting it to particle flows — he uses the word “air” here, which I’m sure we’d disagree with — but if you generalize and think about particle flows, which he’s almost certainly talking about, that explains so much of Epicurean philosophy. A particle-flow explanation of magnetism is probably not too far off at a very basic level.
But having said all that, let’s see how much Martin blasts away at that. Martin, what do you think in general about the magnetism section?
Martin:
Yeah, the thing is it started well with the introductory part last week because it was just referring to the observable phenomena, and here again where it just reports the observable phenomena there’s nothing to object to. But I am not aware of a really suitable model with particles for this. Maybe there is, because for every field you can define some exchange particles. But for a static magnetic field it’s just not the right model. You just use a field model there, and there are no particles flowing, and then it becomes really difficult to explain.
I mean, it could regurgitate the fairy tale you read in textbooks which give people something like a very simple, superficial understanding, and in that sense it’s not completely off. It’s like that book I really like — Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. Now of course we all know both men and women are from Earth and not from there, but as an idea, as a model that there can be entirely different ways of thinking like being from different planets — I like this. And I think these school-textbook explanations and Lucretius’s explanations are on that level.
Cassius:
Well, quickly before we continue — you’re exactly right, and last week I failed to use the word “field” very often, and in my introduction today I failed to use it as well. But “field” of course is what you hear about when you talk about magnetism and gravity. And the connection between the two — there’s still a lot of controversy about the relationship between particles and fields. Isn’t there, Martin?
Martin:
We know that for each field we can then somehow define some exchange particle, and so for some situations that works. And these different models are complementary — depending on what phenomenon you look at, the particle model gives a good explanation, and in other cases not so good. So you can still tweak it and bend it, but actually it’s good to have both models. To talk about static ferromagnets, I just don’t see any benefit in using a particle model.
Cassius:
Well, before we go too much further, let’s get Don and Joshua to comment on how they would approach this section generally. Don, I find it so endearing — his powers of observation in talking about the iron filings in the bottom of the brazen pot. I mean, I remember doing that as a kid with the toy where you could move iron filings around and give the figure mustaches and beards. It’s a very humanizing thing to think of somebody playing around with iron filings in a pot two thousand years ago — that’s one of the things I find so endearing about this section, above and beyond the scientific inquiry. It just makes me smile to think about somebody doing that two thousand years ago.
Joshua:
So I’m looking at the notes here in the Rolfe Humphries translation — I like to go back to that. He writes on this passage on magnetism: “Lucretius’s explanation of magnetism is an ingenious tour de force. All objects are constantly throwing off atoms from their outer surfaces. The loadstone or magnet, in giving off a heavy discharge of particles, evacuates the air between itself and the iron ring nearby.” And then he goes on to describe it further and says at the end that the relationship between magnetism and electricity was not discovered until the early 19th century. So what he seems to be saying is that even though Lucretius may have been wrong about this, Humphries at least thinks that this is an ingenious explanation for an unknown or poorly understood phenomenon.
Cassius:
Yeah, I would agree. I think just the fact that Lucretius can extrapolate from atoms and void to why iron rings stick to a magnet — I would call that a tour de force too.
Joshua:
And then it’s precisely the kind of objection — you have to be able to conceive of an explanation for every kind of physical phenomenon. And the ones that people are going to come back to time and again, if you deny creation or the influence of the gods in the universe, are these weird cases where normally things don’t just fly toward each other. When you put an object somewhere, typically it stays there — but in the particular case of the magnet and iron they will rush toward each other and clank together. And so a materialist needs to have an explanation for that. I never really thought of that before, but you do really have to come up with explanations for those weird phenomena that people say, well, what about that? That’s obviously the gods at work. Those are going to be the hardest ones to explain because people have it in their minds that this is just unexplainable. And to come up with a material physical explanation for it within this philosophy — that was a challenge for him, and I think he rose to the occasion. Whether it’s factually true or not, I think he did rise to the occasion of explaining it in a physical materialist sort of way.
Cassius:
I’m scanning over the first couple of paragraphs as we’re talking, and I think what we’ve been saying basically covers what they’re relaying. I’m not sure it’s going to make sense to drill down into particular sentences unless you guys see something that catches your eye up through about 1042. I know one section that catches my eye is where he says that what he’s discussing is like a ship driven by wind and sails — I do think that’s a good visual analogy of at least his theory. But I have to say, the further we get into things we disagree with, the less useful drilling down into particular sentences might be.
I did not understand in 1042 the point he was making about interposing the brass pot between the filings of steel and the magnet. I didn’t understand where he was going with that. Did anybody get anything out of that part of it?
Don:
That was the part that made me think about the toy from my childhood where the iron filings are in a little plastic case with a picture of a man on it, and you can move the iron filings with a magnet underneath it and give the figure a beard and a mustache. I know I’m dating myself with this particular toy, but if anybody else remembers it — feel free to let me know. I think that’s exactly what Lucretius is talking about here: if you have a pot and you put some rings or filings of steel in there, put the magnet underneath the pot, and those filings move around inside the pot. It’s almost magical — how could this happen? And Lucretius goes, oh no, here’s what’s going on.
Cassius:
But did you actually see that it was pushed away, or did you only see attraction?
Don:
The idea was if you put the magnet underneath, you could get a clump of the iron filings and move them wherever you wanted in the enclosed sheet. So yes, it was attractive.
Martin:
So yes, correct. But he also describes a repulsive force, and I don’t see how this could come about unless these filings have become magnetic themselves.
Don:
That’s exactly what I’m talking about — yes. If by some mechanism the iron filings get magnetized too, then they’re going to be attracted to the magnet but repel each other. So no matter what, there’s going to be some activity going on in the bottom of that brass pot, things are going to be moving around.
Cassius:
But Martin, he seems to be implying that the magnet and the particles would act differently toward each other if you interpose the brass pot — and that’s the part I did not follow at all. Are you with me on that? Is a brass plate between a magnet and an iron particle going to change the way the particles are attracted to or repelled from the magnet?
Martin:
It’s more something like the distance — you need to put some distance there so that you can still have some separation between the magnet and these particles so that you can actually do something with them. Because what happens if you don’t have something interposed — the filings will just stick to the magnet and then you can no more do anything, you have to pluck them off and restart. So the idea is that you just need an interposer from which you can remove the magnet, and whether it’s of brass or plastic it will not make much of a difference.
Cassius:
I’m going to go far out to left field now and ask — if there was a copper content in the brass, or if it were a copper pot, would that do anything with the magnet? Is there any sort of electrical effect that changes with the copper?
Martin:
Hopefully — I mean, there is copper in brass. But now I don’t know how brass’s total properties are with the copper in there, so I really would need to look this up. There can be some solid-state effects, so this one I cannot just pull out of the pocket. I’m not aware that it would do something much different. It could be that it’s paramagnetic, and then in the presence of the magnetic field it could weaken or strengthen the effect — but this is just that it will modify the effect of distance. Like the distance given by a certain thickness of copper will have a similar effect like a material of a different thickness. It will not do something fundamentally different.
Also, even if those iron filings are small magnets, they will just turn around and then again stick to it. So I don’t see how you can… but now what we can see today is, with superconductors — because they have a different type of magnetism, a diamagnetism — you can actually make these things levitate. And this was not possible in the past to demonstrate easily because you could not get strong enough diamagnets. Now with superconductors you can give them far more dramatic effects.
Cassius:
Whenever we talk about topics like this I always think it would be so much fun to be able to pluck Lucretius or Epicurus out of their time and plop them down into ours and say — hey, check out these magnets.
Well, when we get to 1065 we’re going to come to sort of a conclusion and a real payoff that we need to talk about. But we haven’t heard from Joshua in a few minutes — any thoughts, Joshua, before we go there?
Joshua:
I was most interested in the word “lodestone” as I was reading through this. I think I read something because I wasn’t sure — there’s this idea in mining terms or metallurgy where a “lode” or a “mother lode” is like a really rich vein of particular ore going through the earth. So I was curious where the word “lodestone” came from as it relates to magnetism, and apparently it comes from the middle English for “leading stone” — because of course if you have a lodestone and a piece of iron, you can magnetize the iron and then use it to find north. So in middle English they called it a “course stone” or a “leading stone” from the now obsolete meaning of “load” as journey or way of course. I use a compass quite frequently in my work, so that was my primary interest in that section.
Cassius:
That is interesting. I noticed you were talking about that, so I was looking it up on the etymology dictionary, and there was also the term “loadsman,” which means a leader, guide, pilot, or steersman — so that’s very cool.
Joshua:
Yeah, I didn’t know that one. These are good words to know.
Martin:
Is there a German context to “load” or “lead”?
Cassius:
I’m not aware of that, probably there is — but anything if you go back to really the Middle Ages, that’s a time when at least the Germanic part of English and the German language were still much closer.
And the whole idea of “lode” in the mining sense — it says here the mining sense of a vein of metal ore is from the 1600s, from the notion of miners following it through the rock. So it was that whole idea of a journey through the rock where that term came from as well.
Martin:
I was looking for that connection but didn’t find it as quickly as you did.
Cassius:
Well, when you connected it to the word “lead” in English it sure is something you can see a parallel to. Let’s go to 1065 because that’s kind of a linkage between what we’ve been talking about so far and then the issue of disease that comes up next. At 1065, Lucretius talks about how he can produce instances of many things whose natures are peculiarly fit and suited to each other — he talks about lime being used to cement stones, glue used for wood, wine mingling with water, the purple color of the murex — what is a murex?
Don:
Those are the little sea snails where they get the purple dye.
Cassius:
Okay, the murex snails. In general it does seem like he’s turning in 1065 to the comment that different particles react differently with other particles, and depending on the type of particle that’s going to determine how they interact with each other — which is a very basic observation but probably central to Epicurean philosophy. You look at the nature of the particle and you can understand and even predict to some extent how when particles come together they will interact.
Joshua:
This is one of Lucretius’s methods of writing that I find somewhat amusing as well — he’ll go on for hundreds of lines about one specific topic and then have a lightning round at the end. It’s like: well, there are many other instances of this that I could talk about — and this, and this, and this, and this, and this — and then just sort of throws everything in there to get it into the poem, but without going into detail. He goes into excruciating detail about magnets and then says, well, there’s the purple dye and there’s the wine and there’s the stones — you get the idea, and there are many other things he could talk about, but why bother? He says it himself: “To what purpose? I would by no means lead you so far out of the way, nor give myself so much trouble in such inquiries — I have many things yet to explain but I’ll be as short as possible.” So it is interesting, these interjections that sort of convey the flow of things — yeah, the lightning round section.
Martin:
Yeah. I want to drill down on one thing. The first examples are all fine, or I don’t know anything about them. But there is an inconsistency in the translations — here in Brown it says “there is but one mineral that will solder gold and silver together,” but the other translation talks about gold and gold. Can we check the Latin text? There should be different words for gold and silver. One of these must be a wrong translation.
Cassius:
Yeah, are different words — aurum for gold and argentum for silver. I have not checked the Latin on that but I was curious about that connection as well — that there’s only one material that will solder gold to gold, or gold and silver together.
Martin:
It is gold on gold — so aurum on aurum — making two pieces of gold into one, turning them into one. And there are different kinds of gold: there’s white gold, rose gold, yellow gold. I used to work in a metal casting foundry but I don’t know all the differences between them, as you have different core elements in there. White gold has more silver content, and so it depends on what controlled impurities — or beyond traces, what minor constituents — are added to the gold. Copper will really give it a reddish color.
Cassius:
Okay, so these are alloys of gold. The pure gold — if you bring down impurities as low as you can with metallurgical conditions — is very soft, and then to harden it you add other metals, mix them in, and then you get something that’s a bit tougher.
Well, why don’t you guys talk for a second about soldering and what exactly it means? Because I honestly have never fully understood what soldering means — I know what you do with the electrical heat gun, but what does soldering mean really, as opposed to welding?
Martin:
In soldering you use a different material which typically has a lower melting point. You bring it in between the two metals you want to connect, and when this cools down and solidifies you have a fairly tough connection.
Cassius:
And welding is different in what way?
Martin:
In welding you basically use the same material — you make both sides of that material liquid so they run together. You will not typically bring in something fundamentally different. I’m not that familiar with all the details of welding, but from my background in the electronics industry, of course I know soldering very well.
Cassius:
I have never understood that point before but now that you’ve brought it up it makes perfect sense — that welding might be just melting the materials involved, while soldering could be introducing a third material from outside. I do have the impression that welding takes place at a lot higher temperature than soldering.
Martin:
Yes, of course — you need to go to the melting points of what you want to weld. Iron has a much higher melting point than tin, so you really need to go to that high temperature, and typically the welding joint also has much higher strength than a solder joint.
Joshua:
Yeah, I think looking at what technologies the ancients actually had might be an interesting little side note to post on the forum, because I’m always amazed at the things they did know in those sorts of technology areas. It’s like, I didn’t realize they did that kind of thing.
Well, it says here on Wikipedia that electrum — this naturally occurring alloy of gold, silver, and copper — was also used in the making of ancient drinking vessels and sometimes as an exterior coating atop ancient pyramids and obelisks.
Cassius:
Wow, never heard that.
Joshua:
And this is completely out in left field, but I think that’s the thing that annoys me the most about ancient alien shows — the ancients were every bit as curious and technologically adept as we are. They just didn’t have the same materials and tools to work with, but they could come up with anything they needed to do with the tools and experience that they had. The Antikythera mechanism may be one of the best examples.
Cassius:
I probably butchered that pronunciation, but yes — that is a fascinating advanced clock-like computer. You’re right, it’s a fascinating thing.
Well, moving forward from that transition paragraph — our last four sections for today are basically going to move us into the discussion of diseases and prepare us for next week’s episode, which is probably going to be our final episode of the six books, where we go into the details of the plague in Athens. Before we get to the plague of Athens, Lucretius talks about the spread of disease through other areas and that’s what we’ll talk about here in these final passages for today.
It seems to me at least that generally he gets the right idea. I mean, you look at the Europeans coming to North America and the diseases that were brought over, and he’s basically on the right track in at least partially explaining the spread of disease and how different diseases inhabit different areas initially.
Martin:
He is a little bit right when he says water as the transmitter of disease. It’s not so much correct when he’s talking about air — but this was a very common idea all through antiquity, in the Middle Ages, and even up to the 19th century.
Has anyone heard the term “the Great Stink”?
Joshua:
No.
Martin:
The Great Stink — so before Louis Pasteur, in the 1850s, the city of London had grown so hugely in the Victorian era that the Thames River was completely incapable of managing the input of sewage and factory runoff. You have this idea that bad odors — bad air — breeds disease. And the Great Stink was sort of the first real thing to prove that idea wrong. There were all kinds of great quotes around here. There was a newspaper article at the time that said “Gentility of speech is at an end — it stinks,” and then it goes on to say that whoever inhales this vapor will soon forget it, and is very lucky if he lives to remember it. That paints a vivid picture.
Joshua:
Oh yeah, and you’ve got to read the Wikipedia page on this — they talk about sewage that’s like six feet deep on the banks of the river. It’s absolutely awful. And there were two main heroes of the story. One of them was a civil engineer named Joseph Bazalgette, who proposed a system of sewers — which he eventually was allowed to construct — to get everything to flow out to the sea correctly. The other one was a doctor, and his name was John Snow.
So at this time in Europe, you’ve got cholera outbreaks sweeping through the major cities, and it’s being blamed on bad smells. John Snow did this primitive epidemiological analysis of where all the cholera outbreaks were happening and was able to trace them back to certain wells that had been dug near cesspits, where waste from the cesspit was leaking into the well and causing cholera outbreaks in just those one or two neighborhoods. Nobody believed him, and he was not vindicated in his lifetime. And then the Great Stink happened, and people began to understand — it smells so bad in the city of London, and people aren’t really getting all that sick. You would expect a massive cholera outbreak if bad smells were the cause of it, and it wasn’t happening. This was the first indication that John Snow was probably correct. And then Louis Pasteur in France did his experiments, and John Snow was eventually totally vindicated after his death.
Cassius:
Jon Snow did do something.
Joshua:
Yes he did.
Cassius:
Wow, I can’t even imagine — other than walking around nauseous all the time in London. Were there other health effects from the Great Stink besides the smell itself?
Martin:
The other things you may get from this were more subtle — certainly there was a higher percentage of people who eventually suffered in their lungs, depending on what was coming out. More chronic conditions, probably like asthma and breathing difficulties. But these were more subtle things to trace back, because not everybody would get it, and if everybody was walking around with watery eyes and a sore throat it was just, oh, that’s just the way things are in London.
Joshua:
I’m going to read you a quote from Michael Faraday about this: “Near the bridges the feculence rolled up in clouds so dense that they were visible at the surface even in water of this kind. The smell was very bad and common to the whole of the water — it was the same as that which now comes up from gully-holes in the street. The whole river was for the time a real sewer.”
There are some great quotes from this if you want to look at the newspaper articles published at the time — it’s hilarious reading.
Cassius:
What time was this?
Joshua:
This was in high summer, July and August of 1858, in central London.
Martin:
We should have ancient texts which have the same descriptions for the river Tiber in Rome, because that must have been quite terrible in ancient times already.
Cassius:
That’s a good point. Yeah, I think you’re totally accurate — that river was also quite bad at the height of Rome’s power. I mean, it’s not much of a river in the first place, and it probably doesn’t have that vast a current. Well, even the Cuyahoga River caught fire in Cleveland back in the early 1970s and helped start the environmental movement, so the pollution of rivers was a thing for thousands of years evidently.
Don:
Yeah, when you say that Cassius, it just reminds me that when I think of pollution I think of the industrial Midwest.
Cassius:
Exactly — or smog in Los Angeles, things like that. One thing that does catch my eye before we go to concluding comments — it’s the very last sentence of what we’re reading today, where it says it makes no difference whether we travel to places unfavorable to us and change the atmosphere which wraps around us, or whether nature without our choice brings a tainted atmosphere to us — it’s still going to cause us trouble if we come into contact with the wrong environment. He’s making the point that it doesn’t matter whether we go to it or it comes to us, it’s still going to cause us trouble if we come into contact with the wrong environment.
Well, let’s go ahead and talk about closing comments for the day. And always first, let’s go to Martin.
Martin:
I have no closing comment.
Joshua:
No additional text on the Great Stink. I can’t think of anything else.
Don:
Yeah, the only thing I’ll say again is what I said at the beginning — I find his powers of observation and his ability to convey those observations in this metrical structure just always impressive. The humanizing aspects he can bring forward, and just the idea of how closely he observed different phenomena, always strikes me.
Cassius:
Okay, well with that let’s close for the day. Next week will be our final regular episode as we complete Book Six of the text, so thanks for your time today and thanks for listening, and we’ll be back next week.
Don:
Okay.
Cassius:
All right. Thank you.