9 THE GREAT SANITARY AWAKENING

By the turn of the nineteenth century, the factories of the Industrial Revolution were already beginning to pack old cities with newcomers. Soaring urban populations would soon overwhelm the available housing and the adjacent untended, and often uncovered, cesspools. Entire families commonly huddled together in single rooms, often in windowless basements. Overflowing sewage at times made entire cities feel as if adrift atop a sea of human waste. Disease was the inevitable result.