How Victorian Baths Were So Dangerous | Hidden Killers | Absolute History

the desire to be clean meant that the bars popularity outpaced any concern about the dangers which were significant the papers regularly reported cases of scoring so serious they resulted in death one of the rooms the Victorians can claim to have invented is the bathroom and what sure a sign of progress than a private room in which to carry out one's ablutions the bathroom really appears primarily because running water comes into the home for the first time so if you can actually bring water into the home it comes becomes more practical to have a room dedicated to its use until the mid Victorian period hot tubs for bathing had stood next to the fire in the front room or kitchen where water had to be warmed and poured into them this means that servants no longer have to be sort of traipsing up and down four back stairs carrying large amounts of water and I think this is when the bathroom as we know it as a sort of separate private lockable space away from the rest of the house really starts to take shape what the Victorians hated most of all was the idea of bodily fluids the kind of smells they made the kind of traces they left they wanted to expunge them entirely from the body so that no-one can smell the traces of these fluids that link you to the working classes [Music] what happened in this private lockable space could be incredibly dangerous I've come to blaze Castle and Bristol to meet curator Catherine little John's I want to get some idea of the inventions available to the Victorians who sought to meet these new high standards of cleanliness we're just going to look at some of the baths in the collection I'm going to show you one of my favorite things it's actually a gas powered bath so if we have a look at the underneath here you can see where the gas went in at the front here and then just around by you there's a little door which was where you would like that okay so here you'd put in your lighted match or whatever yeah gosh so that's actually ridiculously dangerous isn't it doesn't mean that you can boil self in your bath you very probably could do the instructions the guidance always says they're very careful to point out that you don't want to actually start turning the gas on until you've actually got some water in the baths you don't boil it dry they don't really make a mention of making sure you don't get into the bath while the gas is on the desire to be clean meant that the bars popularity outpaced any concern about the dangers which were significant the papers regularly reported cases of scoring so serious they resulted in death it wasn't until the invention of the thermostat safe the gas and its installation that these risks would be addressed this new room with its cutting-edge innovations would bring even more killers into the home I think they were trying to understand the dangers of electricity and water and gas and all these new services coming into fairly small confined areas without really understanding the dangers of how they actually interact with each other what could be better or more desirable than having a loo that flushed but its introduction was not without problems the first danger lay in the plumbing early plumbing in Victorian houses the the sewer systems didn't efficiently drain away the waste gases such as methane and hydrogen sulfide emanating from human waste would not be able to escape and would build up in the sewer both of these gases are not only flammable but they're also explosive what always used to happen was the the sewerage outlet would get blocked and somebody would have to go and figure out how to clear it to get it to actually run away free at the time there wasn't electric batteries torches and stuff like that so the only way you could act to go and investigate it was unfortunately with her and they could flame not only could gas collect in the sewer methane could actually leak back into the house itself it's quite a common occurrence there's that outlets of toilets to spontaneously combust and that was really where we the the the drive towards improvements in drainage actually came from because they needed to stop mixing getting back into there into the into the houses and it was one of Britain's most famous inventors that helped put a stop to this potential killer with one small but crucial component Thomas Crapper even though he's sort of he gets a lot of good press about inventing the toilet he actually invented the siphon valve which is actually a water trap and a valve flap which actually stops me exciting coming back into the property so it couldn't ignite [Music] it didn't solve problems down in the main sewers but its doctor actually affecting the people who lived in the house [Music] not only were Victorian body is subject to a new regime of washing and scrubbing but what they put on them was too wealthy Victorians both men and women could change their clothes up to five times a day by the late Victorian period laundry had become a huge operation because clothing was not simple there was an extensive amount of clothing even for a child and certainly for a woman she wore a lot of under clothing a lot of linen and these had to be changed regularly the Victorian mistress had a constant battle against her greatest enemy which was dirt the Victorian house could not escape the pollution of the time in London for instance the manure of the hundred thousand working horses the pervasive smog and the smoky gas lamps in the home all took that home Victorian wash day was quite a mammoth task I mean you washed the clothes on the Monday you dry them on the Tuesday and you would be ironing on the Wednesday so a large part of your week would be taken up by the wash doing the laundry was an expensive business and a major part of the household budget for those who could afford it a laundress could be hired in by the day it was a military-style operation every Victorian middle-class woman came to her marriage with great chunks full of white clothing linen and her big job throughout our marriage was keeping those just as brilliantly white and what she used in this endeavor were soaps disinfectants and most of all that she used the mangle so I've just fed this in from from the back here and you just have to get it so that it's between the rollers bringing out heavy fabrics sodden in boiling water became easier with the arrival of the mangle it's not too heavy because of the the gear system and of course this is dry so if you're doing it with wet clothing but of course this brought its own perils why is it so dangerous I mean it seems really quite solid I think it's probably like a lot of Victorian contraptions where yes it is very solid but you've got kind of exposed gear wheels and things and obviously you have to feed the clothing in and what you have to remember is that the lady of the house she would have been doing this with young children around her daughters would have been watching her because they needed to learn how to how to work these things and often probably in quite a confined space all the dangers of little fingers I mean you know the injuries incurred by washday mango accidents were horrific and sometimes fatal Oh a mango could do an awful lot of damage particularly to a child and of course it was typically children who would put the hand out of curiosity into the mango obviously the the hand the arm and he typically was the upper limb that was caught would be compressed and everything in it would be squashed and a significant proportion would have fractures of the bones as well as damage to the soft tissue it was a shearing force where you were pulling the skin in opposite directions and that could completely remove the skin from the hand and the arm and tear it all away to reveal the muscles and tendons underneath mr. bomb surgeon found the child pale pulseless and partially paralyzed and with the parental bones on either side of his head smashed in the dangers of the mango might seem obvious to us now but our next hidden killer was impossible to see both then and now [Music] things couldn't just look clean the new science of germs and microbes was changing ideas of cleanliness from tackling the visible to the invisible dangerous germs they feared could lurk hidden from sight and needed to be eradicated [Music] until the late Victorian period many believed that diseases were caused and carried by bad air but with improvements in technology and the emergence of high-powered microscopes bacteria began to be identified as the cause of disease but this science was brand-new and not easily understood by the general public there are various theories around the origins of disease at this point they're quite confused about it they've started to be aware of germ theory but this isn't fully understood yet what they did understand was that there were microbes all around invisible to the eye but everywhere and this made the Victorians disproportionately fearful and easily spooked some others didn't want to kiss their children because they thought it was spread germs so this is very real and comes up again and again in Diaries the fact that people were afraid of each other because of germs which is a horrific thing when you think about it as this climate of fear escalated so people became increasingly alarmed about all manner of little things [Music] one of the most important things apart from germs will flies the great fly scare of the 1890s the great fly scare was caused by public awareness of the speed with which flies could spread germs flies were everywhere living off the horse manure and trampled into the home once scientists identified flies as carriers of disease the public reacted they realized that one of the main communicators of germs would probably flies with their little sticky feet walking over everything and once used last started to look at flies like that they became objects of horror the terrors of insects and moths and caterpillars that need to be sternly exterminated because they just show the natural world coming in to your perfect home also skirts not strictly speaking in each tooth flies except if you noticed when you walked around with a long skirt on that you would be brushing up against the feces and the horse manure and then and everything else and that was likely to bring fly eggs in or anything so skirt length went up to ankles once skirts went up the shutters came down on flies in the home with a variety of products invented to stop them you have fly screens you have little lace doilies over your milk jugs you have little de stylee's everywhere really you cover your curtains with lace to stop flies come in not really so that you can not see out all of these things which partly to do with the fly scare but the fight against germs would require more than beaded doilies the Victorians needed to believe that these germs were being eradicated by newly invented products that would kill all known germs dead many claims were made in the name of science before these items could be rigorously tested making the late Victorian home a very scary place to be and the Victorians worshiped science they worshiped invention so they would do anything to make things cleaner even if that meant using dangerous chemicals [Music] but as the incredible cleaning powers of these new items became more potent so the dangers in the home increased the problem was that many cleaning products are toxic and they have to be that's how they have their cleaning effects but they were stored and sold in very similar packages so you would go to the shop and get a box that contained something like baking soda which we would use to bake bread or cakes and is perfectly harmless but it would may look very similar to the box of caustic soda which of course is very corrosive and would do a huge amount of damage to the body dangerous chemicals such as caustic soda and carbolic acid were now in the cupboard next to the flour and sugar and were easily muddled the opportunity for mistakes a mix-up between products was huge [Music] drinking bleach or carbolic acid for example would lead to an agonizing death the first thing that would happen it'd be a burning sensation in the esophagus because it is directly corrosive to anything that it comes in contact with and so that would go down into the stomach and cause abdominal pain in the early stages if the person survives and they don't go into renal failure they may develop strictures because of scarring of the esophagus meaning that they're unable to swallow any food and of course that could prove fatal this lack of distinction in bottles and packaging of toxic cleaning materials and dangerous substances didn't just confuse the Victorian at home there were cases where even professionals made mix-ups with disastrous consequences [Music] on one occasion in Bradford a chemist mistakenly mixed arsenic into his Laden's recipe killing 12 people and rendering a further 78 seriously ill and so it was this problem with the packaging that really forced legislation to make packages much more distinct so different shaped and sized and colored bottles and boxes so that you couldn't reach for the flower and pick up the arsenic for example but it wasn't always an accident lethal poisons of all descriptions were easily and readily available over-the-counter with this lay a new temptation because poisoning could go undetected Victorian age was the age of the poisoner the rise of arsenic was to many people a great opportunity previously if he wanted to murder someone you'd have to use your brute strength you'd have to stab them or strangle them when arsenic became widely available there was a lot of comment in the newspaper saying women could just slip it into their husband's tea so why wouldn't they they were absolutely afraid that all the women in Britain would turn poisoner because why would he not murder your husband in golf will be a merry widow why not people bought poisons for things like that poisoning and fly papers so you could easily just go and buy them for completely legitimate reasons the other reason was this is a time when life insurance became available and so you could take out a life insurance policy on one of your family members and then if they died you could claim the money and there's evidence there are quite a few unscrupulous people who took her at large policies before people mysteriously died there many poisons around things like arsenic but probably the worst and the one that caused the most awful death was strychnine strychnine could be used both as a medicine and in the garden as a pesticide a white odorless powder it was like so many other items in the cupboard it has very immediate and unpleasant effects first of all the muscles of the head and the neck would start to contract and then spasm would spread to all the muscles of the body the person would start to convulse and at its worst the muscles of the body would be so contracted that the person would be resting on just their heels and their head with their back bowed in the middle and unable to move death would follow rapidly either because of paralysis of the respiratory muscles which meant that they couldn't breathe or exhausted and following all these awful convulsions demand had never been higher and manufacturers had never sold so many poisonous products it would take a long time for that to change it wasn't until just after the Victorian age in 1902 that the pharmacy Act required the bottles of disinfectant be distinguishable by touch from bottles in which ordinary liquids were contained you

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 3,100,213

Rating: 4.9090071 out of 5

Keywords: history history documentary funny history fun history school, timeline, absolute history, documentary history, history documentary, suzannah lipscomb, suzannah lipscomb documentary, dr suzannah lipscomb, hidden killers of the victorian home, hidden killers of the victorian home - full documentary, victorian history, victorian hidden killers, victorian era, victorian documentaries, victorian documentary bbc, victorian documentary youtube

Id: uB7hIpDCfr0

Length: 19min 41sec (1181 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 05 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/YOUREABOT]

The woman in black dress is a very good storyteller.....🤣