A biography of Sir Joseph Bazalgette, the engineer who designed and built the London sewer system. Fascinating, in a queasy sort of way. Given the obstacles involved, it's amazing that anything got done at all - much less an engineering work of such proportion.

Like everybody else, I got taught the story of John Snow and the "cholera pump" as a classic example of epidemiological detective work. Snow maps the distribution of cholera, it centers around a pump in Broad Street, the pump handle gets removed, cholera stops, it's waterborne, end of story. As The Great Stink of London clarifies, however, it wasn't - nobody important believed chlorea was waterborne. The prevailing wisdom was cholera was spread by "miasmas" - essentially, bad smells - and the miasmatics feel all over themselves demonstrating how Snow's map actually showed that that houses that smelled worst had the most cholera. Even after Koch found the cholera bacteria, there were people - notably, Florence Nightingale - who persisted in the miasmatic theory. Thus Bazalgette's work was not so much to make the Thames potable as to make it smell better.

Something that's absolutely incomprehensible to me is how Bazalgette and his engineers managed to convince the local politicians. Some of the larger London parishes had 1600 different elected or appointed bodies with public works responsibility. And none of them wanted to let somebody tear up their streets to put in sewers. How could anybody be patient and politically astute enough to deal with this? I would have been hurling myself across the conference table to bang heads against the wall after the first ten minutes. Makes me rethink some of my libertarian anti-big-government principles.

Another obstacle Bazalgette had to fight against was the persistent belief that sewage was valuable and should be collected and used, not treated and disposed of. Like many recycling schemes, the "valuable sewage" schemers simply looked at the expense of conventional fertilizer without taking into account collection, treatment and distribution costs for sewage-based manure.

A couple of (minor) complaints; I would have liked to have seen more discussion of the actual mechanics involved in building a Victorian sewer, and the cover illustration is just hideous. ( )