84 
IOWA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 
lations. Especially was this true in the middle ages in the 
large cities. During the time of Queen Elizabeth, Paris 
and London have been described by historians as follows: 
“The old Greek and Roman religion of external cleanliness 
was turned into a sin. The outward and visible sign of 
sanctity now was to be unclean. No one was clean, but 
the devout Christian was unutterably foul. The tone of 
the middle ages in the matter of dirt was a form of mental 
disease. Cooped up in castles and walled cities, with 
narrow courts and sunless alleys, they would pass day and 
night in the same clothes, within the same airless, gloomy, 
windowless and pestiferous chambers; they would go to 
bed without night clothes, and sleep under uncleansed 
sheepskins and frieze rugs; they would wear the same 
leather, fur and woolen garments for a lifetime, and even 
for successive generations; they ate their meals without 
forks, and covered up the orts with rushes; they flung their 
refuse out of the window into the street or piled it up in 
the back yard; the streets were narrow, unpaved, crooked 
lanes through which, under the very palace turrets, men 
and beasts tramped knee-deep in noisome mire. This was 
at intervals varied with fetid rivulets and open cesspools; 
every church was crammed with rotting corpses and 
surrounded with graveyards, sodden with cadaveric liquids, 
and strewn with disinterred bones. Round these charnel 
houses and pestiferous churches were piled old decaying 
wooden houses, their sole air being these deadly exhala- 
tions, and their sole water supply being these polluted 
streams or wells dug in this reeking soil. Even in the 
palaces and castles of the rich the same bestial habits pre- 
vailed. Prisoners rotted in noisome dungeons under the 
banqueting hall; corpses were buried under the floor of the 
private chapel; scores of soldiers and attendants slept in 
gangs for months together in the same hall or guardroom 
where they ate and drank, played and fought.’^ 
This is a dark picture, but no doubt a faithful descrip- 
tion of the sanitary conditions of that age. 
