It seems as though Johnson enjoys repeatedly playing on the irony of the situation that in an attempt to fix the problem, Edwin Chadwick had unknowingly made the problem much worse.
“This is the great irony of Chadwick’s life: in the process of inventing the whole idea of a social safety net, he unwittingly sent thousands of Londoners to an early grave.”
It also goes hand in hand with the amount of influence the miasma theory actually had. Looking back and thinking what was going on in their minds though, it is hard to blame the city’s leaders. As Morris Hedaya mentioned in his post, there are many diseases that are in fact airborne. What the people devoted to the miasma theory did not realize was the evolutionary purpose of being able to smell bad odors, which is to prevent people from ingesting the source of these bad odors. Little did they know, most of the time, smelling rotting flesh did not actually cause disease. Chadwick had thought getting rid of the smell would prevent disease, but he forgot that flushing the cesspools into the river would cause so many to actually ingest the disease causing agent.
Hi Sauly,
Make sure you change your category from “uncategorized” to the correct date so that you get credit for your work!