The inflection point

Okay, pretty correct answers from our two commenters on the previous post. Not just chlorination, but clean water generally, i.e. sewage treatment and separating sewage from drinking water sources. Also pasteurization of milk was very important. But the story is a bit more complicated. Pre-industrial people were mostly rural, obviously drank their milk fresh and didn ' t have a lot to fear from waterborne diseases since their population was sparse. Obviously they did suffer greatly from other plagues -- the Black Death killed something like half the population of Europe in the mid-14th Century, and plague recurred in lesser epidemics thereafter. Smallpox was another big killer.  But by the 19th Century, people had learned to control plague by isolation and quarantine, and smallpox vaccination was becoming commonplace. In any case, even before then, life expectancy and population growth were limited between infectious disease outbreaks by the Malthusian trap -- any increase in agricultural productivity, or in the availability of land per capita because of a plague, would immediately result in a population increase that used up all the surplus. People were commonly malnourished and at a bare level of subsistence. That started to change by 1776 (auspicious year?) when James Watt made important improvements to his steam engine, putting in process the Industrial Revolution. England could now achieve prosperity even for a growing population, by using fossil fuel powe...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs