What was joseph bazalgette famous forensic cases

Joseph Bazalgette saved thousands of lives by sorting the sewers. So why’s the ‘Sewer King’ who risked his own health to help others, whose system’s still used by millions today, largely forgotten?

Joseph William Bazalgette is born at home in Enfield, London on 28 March His father is a retired Royal Navy captain. Despite a French family background, his father saw active combat and was wounded during the Napoleonic wars. Joseph’s mother, Theresa Philo Pilton, has eight other children. But Joseph is their only son. He is a small child and will remain of small stature.

KILLER CHOLERA

When Joseph is 12, England has its first recorded case of cholera. It is a dangerous age. British people still need to take quinine to fight off the ever present threat of malaria. When Queen Victoria comes to the throne, only a half of London’s infants live to their fifth birthday. Urban life expectancy is 35 when Joseph is born. It’s down to 29 just a decade later.

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'Dirty Old London': A History Of The Victorians' Infamous Filth

Mar 12, pm (Fresh Air / Fresh Air)

Horses drive traffic on London's Oxford Street in According to author Lee Jackson, by the s, the city's horses produced approximately 1, tons of dung a day. Image: London Stereoscopic Company/Getty Images

'Dirty Old London': A History Of The Victorians' Infamous Filth

In the 19th century, London was the capital of the largest empire the world had ever known — and it was infamously filthy. It had choking, sooty fogs; the Thames River was thick with human sewage; and the streets were covered with mud.

But according to Lee Jackson, author of Dirty Old London: The Victorian kamp Against Filth, mud was actually a euphemism. "It was essentially composed of horse dung," he tells Fresh Air's Sam Briger. "There were tens of thousands of working horses in London [with] inevitable consequences for the streets. And the Victorians never really found an effective way of removing that

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Sir Joseph Bazalgette and London&#;s Sewers

He who drinks a tumbler of London Water has literally in his stomach more animated beings than there are Men, Women and Children on the face of the Globe.

Sydney Smith, Anglican Cleric

Imagine the smell that three million Londoners could make if their toilets poured into overflowing cesspools or drains in the street, or if they emptied chamberpots out of their windows. It's unthinkable now, but that was reality in

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Victorians knew this wasn't healthy, but not why. When Queen Victoria came to the throne, only half of London's infants lived to their fifth birthday. Diseases such as cholera were rife in the capital.

The first recorded case of cholera in England was in Newcastle in , and there were major outbreaks in and But there was no cure and no treatment. Since Roman times, it had been thought that diseases like malaria – and, by extension, cholera – were spread in the air by 'mias