Sanitation, Nutrition, Colonization: The Nineteenth Century in Europe

           In the 19^th century was the overall scientific revolution. When scientists and engineers took the theories and instruments discovered during the scientific revolution in the 17^th and 18^th centuries and created practical applications for them. Hence, they created machines that caused revolutions in industry, medicine, and science. Using microscopes and experiments, scientists proved that organisms invisible to the naked eye made food and wine ferment and caused diseases in humans and also animals.  So, in the 18^th and 19^th century scientists were taking a new look at nutrition and sanitation then proved studies about microorganisms or as you call it germs and genes. Next are some of the phenomenon and causes that also contributed on the industrial revolution towards humankind: cholera epidemic in London, yeast destroyed wine in France, and crossbreeding plants by Luther Burbank.

      A. England: dr. Snow and the Water Supply

            In 1854, a cholera epidemic struck London. This disease causes death by draining the body of all fluids in a violent and rapid way. Eventually this epidemic was considered strange, where people in one neighbourhood got cholera while people a block away didn’t. Dr. John Snow who was a physician, finally figured it out, while people were getting their water from different wells. Those who got cholera used a well that was contaminated by people dumping the contents of their sick babies’ diapers down it. Dr. Snow had the handle from that pump removed, and ended the cholera epidemic. From this and other scientific experiments came germ theory and an understanding of how diseases spread. The transmission of cholera, typhoid, salmonella, and other sanitation diseases is through a “fecal-oral”, where you will obtain from poor personal hygiene. In the mid–nineteenth century, London and Paris established public health departments to deal with sanitation in the growing cities.

      B. France: Yeast

            It was a national disaster when the wines of France were ruined. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the wine in France went sour, smelled and tasted bad. It was not even good vinegar. Vintners were mystified: there was nothing wrong with the grapes as they grew on the vines, and they had been harvested, stored, and processed the same way as they had for centuries. But there was no wine in France. It was a tremendous blow to the national economy and to the national pride. Although fermentation had been known for 5,000 years, since the Egyptians discovered that it turned grain into beer, exactly how it occurred remained a mystery. A scientist, Louis Pasteur looked under his microscope and became the first person in the world to see exactly what caused fermentation, which is yeast. He also discovered that if the wine was heated to a certain point, it could kill the organisms that caused the wine to turn sour. While the ones that made it ferment and turn into good wine lived. This process of heating foods to destroy organisms that cause spoilage was named after him, pasteurization.

     C. The U.S.: Luther Burbank

            Americans were also influenced by evolution and the advances in agricultural science in Europe. Luther Burbank invented a better potato, one that would be more resistant to disease, by crossbreeding potatoes to create a hybrid. It was further modified and became the Idaho potato. While he moved to Napa, California, where he experimented with more than 4,500 species of plants, including seeds and seedlings from India, France, Chile, Persia, Mexico, and Japan, and built or crossbreed many other new plant, including the Santa Rosa Plum; the plumcot, a plum-apricot cross;  the Shasta daisy, and even the white blackberry.