Reid (history, U. of NC Chapel Hill) emphasizes the human story of sewers--politics, sanitation, labor. The engineering of Parisian sewers occupies some 85 pages (lacking a single map). Good book. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

In the second half of the nineteenth century, when Paris became a modern urban center, the problem of working-class housing emerged as a major issue. In this study Ann-Louise Shapiro examines the reform activites of philanthropists, economist, municipal authorities, politicians, and public hygienists as they, together and separately, responded to the quesitons of the worker's foyer. Shapiro shows that the hgousing cmapign touched all aspects of the "the social question." providing a rare perspective on the political, social, and institutional readjustments required by a changing urbgan environment in nineteenth century France. Shapiro's work will prove important reading for students and scholars of French history, urban society and government, and public health issues.

The little-known story of the systems that bring us our drinking water, how they were developed, the problems they are facing, and how they will be reinvented in the near future

This book tells the story of an epochal change in the human condition that was part of what is often thought of as 'modernization' -a process that remade culture and society in France in the 19th and 20th centuries. Hygiene, Steven Zdatny convincingly contends, was that change. He reflects on how the development of hygiene: changed the way people thought about and treated their bodies; put an end to age-old afflictions and brought comfort where discomfort had been the unavoidable companion of existence; and helped produce a tripling of life expectancy. The book considers how the evolution of hygiene produced a society where people washed often, changed their clothes every day, lived without lice and scabies, and performed their natural functions indoors. It reflects on developments in industrial plumbing, public education, government investment, the invention of new products to keep bodies and homes clean, and a parallel makeover in the expectations, sensibilities, and practices about what is 'proper' and what is disgusting. These developments, the study reveals, were not steady and did not happen everywhere at the same pace. But in the fullness of time, they produced a revolution in the human condition.

"It has come to be widely accepted that "sexuality" as we know it took shape at the end of the nineteenth century, This is when Krafft-Ebing asserted that "sexual feeling is really the root of all ethics, and no doubt of aestheticism and religion," and Havelock Ellis declared sexuality to be the "central problem of life." Yet however self-evident Ellis's claim about sexuality might seem the act of placing something at the center is the consequence of insistent cultural work that engages with competing views about bodies and indeed about the "life" of society. This volume examines how this work was carried out and what resulted from such efforts."--BOOK JACKET.

A global guide to sewers that celebrates the magnificently designed and engineered structures beneath the world's great cities. The sewer, in all its murkiness, filthiness, and subterranean seclusion, has been an evocative (and redolent) literary device, appearing in works by writers ranging from Charles Dickens to Graham Greene. This entertaining and erudite book provides the story behind, or beneath, these stories, offering a global guide to sewers that celebrates the magnificently designed and engineered structures that lie underneath the world's great cities. Historian Stephen Halliday leads readers on an expedition through the execrable evolution of waste management—the open sewers, the cesspools, the nightsoil men, the scourge of waterborne diseases, the networks of underground piping, the activated sludge, the fetid fatbergs, and the sublime super sewers. Halliday begins with sanitation in the ancient cities of Mesopotamia, Greece, and Imperial Rome, and continues with medieval waterways (also known as “sewage in the street”); the civil engineers and urban planners of the industrial age, as seen in Liverpool, Boston, Paris, London, and Hamburg; and, finally, the biochemical transformations of the modern city. The narrative is illustrated generously with photographs, both old and new, and by archival plans, blueprints, and color maps tracing the development of complex sewage systems in twenty cities. The photographs document construction feats, various heroics and disasters, and ingenious innovations; new photography from an urban exploration collective offers edgy takes on subterranean networks in cities including Montreal, Paris, London, Berlin, and Prague.

Ultimately, the attitudes of physicians and the French public were shaped by political struggles between republicans and the clergy, by aggressive efforts to educate and civilizethe peasantry, and by long-term shifts in the public's ability to tolerate the odor of bodily substances.--Donald Reid, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill "American Historical Review"

Unlike any other city in the world, Paris has underneath it a whole other urban space comprised of abandoned rock quarries, waterways, a sophisticated sewer system, a dense subway system, shopping centers and catacombs. Throughout history stories have been told of political dissidents, thieves, partying beatniks, spelunkers, artists and phantoms, all wandering in a subterranean city of dark under the City of Light. Now you can descend with the author as she goes down to see for herself, meeting the people who dwell in this underworld.

The Romans developed sophisticated methods for managing hygiene, including aqueducts for moving water from one place to another, sewers for removing used water from baths and runoff from walkways and roads, and public and private latrines. Through the archeological record, graffiti, sanitation-related paintings, and literature, Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow explores this little-known world of bathrooms and sewers, offering unique insights into Roman sanitation, engineering, urban planning and development, hygiene, and public health. Focusing on the cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, Ostia, and Rome, Koloski-Ostrow's work challenges common perceptions of Romans' social customs, beliefs about health, tolerance for filth in their cities, and attitudes toward privacy. In charting the complex history of sanitary customs from the late republic to the early empire, Koloski-Ostrow reveals the origins of waste removal technologies and their implications for urban health, past and present.

In this comprehensive and engaging volume, medical historian Jonathan Reinarz offers a historiography of smell from ancient to modern times. Synthesizing existing scholarship in the field, he shows how people have relied on their olfactory sense to understand and engage with both their immediate environments and wider corporal and spiritual worlds. This broad survey demonstrates how each community or commodity possesses, or has been thought to possess, its own peculiar scent. Through the meanings associated with smells, osmologies develop--what cultural anthropologists have termed the systems that utilize smells to classify people and objects in ways that define their relations to each other and their relative values within a particular culture. European Christians, for instance, relied on their noses to differentiate Christians from heathens, whites from people of color, women from men, virgins from harlots, artisans from aristocracy, and pollution from perfume. This reliance on smell was not limited to the global North. Around the world, Reinarz shows, people used scents to signify individual and group identity in a morally constructed universe where the good smelled pleasant and their opposites reeked. With chapters including "Heavenly Scents," "Fragrant Lucre," and "Odorous Others," Reinarz's timely survey is a useful and entertaining look at the history of one of our most important but least-understood senses.