Original subtitles

[upbeat music] [electrical buzzing]

- [Henry] Did you know that there was a time

when you went to the barber

and your hair wasn't the only thing getting cut?

- They could lop off a limb in three minutes.

- At the time you're getting your hair cut,

also have your leeches applied.

It's a one-stop shop.

- Or if you wanted fresh breath,

all you had to do was light up.

- So the solution for all the problems

that cigarettes caused was more cigarettes.

What a ballsy move!

You have to admire it in a way.

- Or when the sting you felt from mom's antiseptic

was the least of your problems?

- We're basically just dosing children

for average everyday cuts with mercury.

Over and over again, here's some poison to treat that wound.

- Little did I know that I would be carrying this mercury

in my body, but it didn't sting,

and that's the important part.

- These are the things we used to do for fun,

for money,

or maybe out of boredom,

that we'll never see again.

Were they dangerous?

Certainly.

Deadly?

Occasionally.

But boy, wasn't it exciting?

Today, there are not many things people find as unhygienic

as a public restroom.

But if you think those are unpleasant,

the ones in the 1800s would make you wish you'd never

stop wearing diapers.

- In 1900 in Manhattan, there are not enough bathrooms.

In tenements, there's only one required per every 20 people.

It's a huge challenge for people that just have places

to do their business and to get rid of it.

- [Henry] Few New Yorkers have access

to private indoor plumbing to flush it all away.

So many turn to the classic solution, chamber pots.

- A chamber pot is a ceramic

or metal vessel that you kept in a room where you slept,

and it is where you went potty in.

- They've existed since antiquity,

and for millennia, they've been the quickest

and easiest way to do your business.

And they still exist,

especially for city dwellers at this time.

- [Natalia] If it's cold or there's a blizzard

or you're just tired,

you can just go to the bathroom right there in your room.

- [Henry] Some sellers market upgraded models with chairs

and seats, making these chamber pots a luxury item.

- [Hakeem] Even today,

a lot of people don't have a bathroom in their bedroom.

Imagine you can just roll out of bed, use a chamber pot,

roll right back into bed.

- [Austin] Chamber pots are such a necessity.

We have an expression about it.

You don't have a pot to piss in means you're so poor,

you can't afford a chamber pot.

- [Henry] But even if you have one,

what happens after you've gone?

- [Austin] This thing's been sitting in your room all night

filling up with you and your partners

and maybe a couple children's detritus.

So it's going to be festering.

The smell's not going to be nice.

- And how do you even do that when you're married?

You're going to watch your wife tinkle in a pot

in the corner and then leave it there all night.

Everything about it sounds horrible.

- And so the result is that if you wake up in the middle

of the night, you better walk carefully

because there's a chamber pot out there full

of something that you don't want to put a foot in.

- [Austin] If you don't have servants

and live up high, congratulations,

you're your own department of sanitation.

When it's time to do a cleanup, open the window,

toss the contents out.

- If you were out in the street, you could look up

and someone could like throw a bucket

of urine over your head.

- [Martin] Or if you had like a breezeway,

dump it in the breezeway rather

than out the front of the building.

- These dumping places become festering open cesspools.

Attracting vermin, spreading disease.

Anywhere that has a frequency of dumping is just gross.

- [Henry] And this isn't just a few naughty neighbors

tossing their waste into the street.

It's everyone.

- [Natalia] In the early 1900s,

there are more people living in Manhattan than ever before.

In fact, more than today.

There are 100,000 people living per square mile,

and in some places, a thousand per acre.

- [Martin] A simple walk down the street caused you to come

into contact with human excrement everywhere.

That was something that everyone had to live with.

Today, it's adorable to hear people complain

about how the city is dirty and it smells.

And I'm like,

"You have no idea what this place used to be like."

- [Natalia] I mean, all those period pieces with the gorgeous

dresses and the manners and the propriety,

and yet they were all pooping in chamber pots.

- [Henry] Chamber pots lead to waste covering the streets,

but they're only an option when you're home.

So what do you do when nature calls away from home?

- [Hakeem] Today, we have public restrooms everywhere.

But in the early 1900s,

all they have is the dreaded public outhouse.

- [Natalia] Basically, these public outhouses have

zero privacy.

A public outhouse would basically be a

shack with a big pit inside

and then a wood bench with holes in it,

sometimes up to 12 holes.

So just picture that, you're going to go to the bathroom

and you're maybe sitting with 11 of your friends,

colleagues, partners, who knows?

I actually don't even know which one

of those people would be worse to be doing this with.

- [Brian] I don't think that people really understand

how many spiders like to live in outhouses

because the flies are attracted to it.

And the spiders are attracted to the flies.

So it's the creepiest thing of all time.

I would rather go in my pants than go in an outhouse.

- [Hakeem] And the thing about these public outhouses is

that they didn't invest a lot

of money into the construction quality.

- [Natalia] Liquid waste will seep in, the boards rot.

They smell terrible. They are really pretty rickety.

- Things can go bad, you probably heard the expression

when someone stays in the bathroom a long time,

someone will yell, "What did you do, fall in?"

Well, that actually happened.

- [Natalia] In 1904 in Cincinnati, during school

recess, there's a big storm and 30 school girls run

into the public outhouse to take cover.

- [Hakeem] And the floor gives way.

All the girls fall right into the pit of human waste.

And of the 30, nine of them end up drowning.

The incident becomes national news

and it becomes known as the Cincinnati Privy Disaster.

- [Henry] And falling in is far

from the only outhouse hazard.

- At this time in the South, it's extremely hot.

It's extremely muggy.

People either don't have shoes

or they don't want to wear them,

and so they end up walking to the outhouse barefoot.

- [Hakeem] Going into the outhouse barefoot is gross

for many reasons,

but one you probably aren't aware of is hookworms.

Hookworms are these tiny parasitic worms that enter

through the skin of your foot.

Having hookworms can lead to anemia, fatigue,

or stunted growth.

- [Henry] Luckily,

modern plumbing eventually arrives to save the day.

- [Martin] Indoor plumbing is civilization.

It's just that simple.

We mark a profound difference in the lived experience

from even a hundred years ago by our use of plumbing.

It makes our lives vastly more sanitary

and therefore vastly more healthy.

- For Americans back in the day,

surviving the outhouse was only step one.

Step two was finding a way

to clean up afterwards without serious bodily injury.

- The quest to find something

to wipe your behind with is as old as civilization itself.

The ancient Greeks, for example, would use shards of pottery

or even small stones.

- By the 1700s, the printing press has made newspapers

and political pamphlets cheap

and easy to make all through the colonies.

So that means there's a lot of paper.

And guess what all those colonists are using that paper

for after they've finished reading with it?

- Using paper for this purpose became so common

that people started referring to these kind of pages

as bumfodder, which is pretty hilarious

because if you're trying to tell someone what you think

about their politics, just wipe your keister with it,

you know, let them have it.

- [Henry] Fortunately, it's only a matter of time

until American innovation strikes again.

- In 1891, the first perforated toilet paper is patented.

And then what starts to appear in households looks a lot

closer to what we know as toilet paper today.

- [Henry] Close, but with one very noticeable difference.

- [Rutledge] Toilet paper is made from wood pulp,

but back then, if that wood pulp wasn't really,

really refined, you would find some larger little pieces

of wood in there, which we would probably refer

to as a splinter.

And I can't think of a more unpleasant place

to get a splinter.

- Splinters in your butt, not something you want.

But this is such a common problem that one manufacturer,

when they've sort of solved it,

one of their big marketing things is they put it right

on the package, splinter-free.

- [Rutledge] Which that really feels like the just lowest,

the bottom of the promises.

Everyone's toilet paper should be splinter-free.

- [Jason] This is equivalent to like, "Hey, buy our bath towels.

They don't have glass shards in them."

- [Rutledge] And some people are having to warn that certain

kinds of toilet paper can basically send you to surgery.

Like that's how harsh this world really is.

- [Kavitha] Think about how resilient you had to be back

then if you were using like splintered toilet paper

and then just going about your day.

I think we are soft compared to that.

As is our toilet paper.

- Toilet paper continued to get refined,

literally over the next few years.

By the 1930s,

you had the soft splinter-free version we all know

and love today.

- In the 20th century, we made huge progress

on some of the biggest hygiene problems in history,

but we had plenty of trouble dealing with one tiny, elusive,

rather disgusting creature.

- Lice, skeeves you out, right, lice?

Well, they've been hitching a ride

in hair for more than 25 million years.

- [Austin] Here's a little refresher on lice.

Lice are tiny parasitic insects.

They're about the size of a sesame seed,

and they nest in hair.

They feed on our blood,

and they transmit from person

to person via personal objects, combs, clothing,

or interpersonal contact.

- [Dan] And unlike a lot of other creepy crawlies

that we've had to deal with over the course

of human history,

we've just never quite managed to get rid of lice.

- [Martin] We were being brought into the school nurse's office

every month, and she would inspect all of us for lice.

She would simply sort of root around on your scalp,

have a look at your scalp, and then send you on your way.

It was just one of the many indignities that we were exposed

to in the school nurse's office.

- But God forbid you got sick the day after lice day.

Undeniable why you were sick.

You were the one with the lice.

- [Brian] There was a lice epidemic in my school

and the whole school had it.

It was miserable,

and then the dead ones you had to comb out, it's horrible.

Even talking about it now,

I'm getting the heebie-jeebies.

- [Henry] Back in the early 20th century,

people are so desperate

for an effective lice treatment that they turn

to a brand new miracle substance.

Kerosene.

- [Kavitha] Kerosene is a pretty revolutionary product.

By the turn of the century, it's being used

for everything from heating homes to industrial cleaning,

and even killing lice off of farm animals.

- [Martin] And it doesn't take long before someone realizes,

well, if this works on the livestock,

maybe I should put it on the kids.

- Medical journals of the day think it's a great idea.

They even provide detailed instructions.

Wash the scalp thoroughly, then clip the hair,

then apply equal parts kerosene and olive oil.

- [Kavitha] The instructions go

on to say that after you wash the hair, you're supposed

to pop on a bathing cap, wait 12 to 24 hours,

and then wash and comb it out.

- [Martin] And parents find that it's an extremely effective

course of treatment, but you also have the reality

of a child walking around for 24 hours with a kerosene head.

- [Dan] I feel like I shouldn't have to say this,

but let me be clear.

You shouldn't put kerosene on your kid's head,

even if they have lice.

- [Brian] It worked in killing the lice,

but this might also kill the people with the lice because,

I mean, you're a matchstick.

You're walking matchstick all day

in a day where everybody smokes.

- Any spark around you has the potential

of setting off the kerosene that is now dousing your head,

- And the kerosene is on your head and you went up

like a bonfire.

- [Dan] Over the years,

there are numerous stories of terrible accidents resulting

from kerosene lice treatments.

Kids get first, second,

and third degree burns on their faces, on their scalps,

on their necks, and on their shoulders.

- [Martin] Yeah, there are risks associated with using kerosene

as a treatment, but we're going

to have to do it because there wasn't another useful course

of treatment at the time.

- [Henry] By the 1950s, kerosene loses its luster.

And a new innovation hits the market, lice shampoos.

- [Austin] For lice shampoo, one common active ingredient

is lindane.

Lindane works a little bit differently than kerosene.

It overstimulates the louse's nervous system,

causing eventual death.

- [Henry] Death to lice. Exactly what the doctor ordered.

But this shampoo is doing more than de-lousing your kid.

- [Kavitha] Overuse, misuse,

or swallowing the shampoo can be toxic for your kid's brain.

And one shampoo company even includes a warning label

to be careful when using on infants, toddlers, and children.

But that's who it's meant for.

- [Dan] It's great.

It's killing the lice, but it's a neurotoxin

and a child's head is full

of neurons that you don't want to hurt.

So by the 1990s, they only allow lindane to be on the market

as an absolute last resort treatment for lice.

- [Kavitha] It's actually banned in the state of California

and in agricultural use throughout the entire US.

And this is something that we used on our kids for decades.

- When it came to hair, in the old days,

having lice was just the beginning.

- In 17th century America,

the medical profession is very different than it is today.

There's really a divide between two different types.

There's physicians and there's surgeons.

The physician is going

to be someone who's university educated.

They mostly deal with wealthy people.

They mostly deal with internal medicine.

- But when it comes time to actually do some cutting

and sewing or pull out a tooth, well,

the physician jobs that out to someone else, a surgeon.

- [Rutledge] And who are the workers in the neighborhood

with the steadiest hands?

Your barber, barbers don't just handle grooming needs,

cutting hair, shaving beards, no, no.

They also can do a lot of other stuff.

They can lance a boil.

They can cut you for bloodletting.

- [Lance] It's pretty convenient.

At the time you're getting your hair cut.

Also have your leeches applied, it's a one-stop shop.

- [Hakeem] Believe it or not,

the person that cuts your hair will also amputate your leg.

Especially in times of war,

amputations are a big part of the barber's job.

This isn't Medieval Europe.

We're not talking about the Roman Coliseum.

This is America,

and this is still happening in the early 1800s.

- [Rutledge] They could lop off a limb in three minutes.

Nowadays, that's like a three-hour surgery at least.

I mean, I want to be clear.

If I need to have something amputated,

I would prefer the three-hour surgery by real surgeons.

- [Henry] And barbers aren't hard to find.

They hang some very peculiar signage out front.

- [Lance] They reuse bandages.

So they just rinse them out and they hang them up to dry.

And that becomes a form of advertising.

People start

to recognize that if you see bloody bandages out front,

that's a barber surgeon.

- [Adam] Fittingly, that amount of gore as advertising is seen

as off-putting.

So ultimately, they create the now iconic pole that is white

with a swirl of red

as a little bit of an homage to the blood soaked bandages.

- [Henry] While barbers may act like surgeons,

their practices are far from sterile.

- [Hakeem] If you have ever gone to a barbershop in the last 50

years or so?

You see that there's that thing

of blue liquid where they put tools in there.

That liquid is known as barbicide,

and it's a disinfectant.

And it's not invented until 1947.

So barbers don't sterilize anything.

- [Adam] The knives, the saws, the scissors,

they were just used from one patient

after the other, which means if a saw was used on you,

it's still dripping with the blood from the patient

before you.

- [Lance] Eventually,

we're starting to get more medical schools in America,

and the field becomes more professionalized,

and people realize that surgery requires

more sophisticated training than shaving.

- [Rutledge] The last vestiges

of the barbershop surgeon were really gone by the 1800s.

After that, barbershops started looking a lot more like

what we know them to be today.

- [Adam] That pole seems like a very sweet candy cane-ish

reminder of times gone by.

When you look at it, what you should see are bloody bandages

all in a wild swirl around a bloodletting, tooth pulling,

haircutting, shaving barbershop.

- Imagine what those barbershops were like.

We don't even like to nick ourselves shaving today.

But back then, they were drawing blood on purpose.

- We all want fresh breath,

but back in the day,

some people had a very different way to get it.

And it's probably the last thing you'd expect to find

in a dentist's office.

- In the 1920s, a guy named Lloyd Spud Hughes is working

as a cashier in his family's restaurant in Mingo Junction,

Ohio.

Spud has asthma,

and one day to help him with his symptoms,

his mom gives him some menthol crystals.

- [Natalia] Menthol crystals come from peppermint oil.

If you dissolve one

or two in hot water,

it releases a vapor that really relieves congestion.

- [Don] It's a similar principle to that vapor goop

that your mom used to slather on your chest

whenever you got a cold.

This is just the steam form.

And to make sure he doesn't lose track of these crystals,

Spud stores them in the same container

where he keeps his cigarettes.

Yeah. Spud the asthmatic is a smoker.

- [Brian] So good old Spud keeps his menthol crystals

in with his cigarettes.

That bleeds over into the cigarettes.

He smokes it, gets a fresh minty taste.

Menthol cigarettes are born.

- [Lance] Spud patents the idea

and he sells it to a tobacco manufacturer.

They start to see that maybe there's value beyond the taste

because of the menthol.

They tell you it's actually going to give you good breath.

- [Jason] So they start marketing spud menthol

cigarettes, they give you a fresh, cool mouth.

They make your mouth feel as fresh as a May morning.

- [Brian] There was something

about the menthol cigarette that took a cigarette

and elevated it to a fancy, almost candy-like arena.

- [Jason] Those other cigarettes, oh, they

might be enjoyable.

But do they freshen your breath?

So it's like back up your cigarette with another cigarette

to take care of the smell that the first cigarette gave you.

I mean, this is genius.

- [Henry] The advertising works.

And by 1932,

Spud Cigarettes are the fifth most popular brand

in the country.

- A whole bunch of other people actually jump

on the bandwagon too,

and you've got a few competing menthol cigarette brands.

- [Henry] And these new cigarettes push their menthol

marketing even further.

- To the snowfresh coolness of cool.

- What's so interesting,

one of these ads actually says, "Got a cold.

Smoke a Kool."

So the idea that smoking menthols will help you

with a respiratory issue is actually

something being marketed with a straight face.

- So you're kind of killing two birds

and your lungs with one stone.

- [Brian] By the 1960s,

people start catching on that smoking is not good for you.

And what do the menthol cigarette companies do?

They start telling you, "Hey, not our cigarettes."

- [Narrator] Switch from hot to snow fresh filter.

- Not only are cigarettes not bad for you,

they will help deal with the problems

that smoking caused for you.

So the solution for all the problems that cigarettes caused

was more cigarettes.

What a ballsy move. You have to admire it in a way.

- [Henry] It's true marketing magic,

at least while it lasts.

- In 1964, the Surgeon General releases a landmark report

that leads to a safety label that we've all seen.

Caution.

Cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health.

- And we can add to that now.

It's probably not good for your bad breath either.

- So lighting up couldn't fix bad breath.

That doesn't mean we stop using small fires

to solve hygiene problems.

In the fight against earwax,

people in the 1990s turn their heads

into full-on candle opreras.

- For thousands of years,

we've had a complicated relationship with earwax.

Is it good? Is it bad?

Why is it called wax?

- [Adam] Earwax is actually made in our bodies by special glands

in and around the ear canal.

And if there's too much buildup,

it could actually cause hearing loss.

- [Jason] We've used everything imaginable

to get ear wax out of our ears.

Look, the rougher way, we use our fingers.

You just can get our fingers in there.

But we use cotton swabs and we use suction cups.

There's all sorts of things.

- [Negin] I just need to know that like

when I pull an AirPod out of my ears,

it's not disgusting for anyone who may happen to notice.

- [Henry] In the 1990s,

there's a resurgence of a natural method for wax removal.

It's known as ear candling.

- [Dan] Ear candling, as a practice,

is documented to go back at least to the early 1900s,

but people who are fans

of it say that it goes back to ancient times.

- How ear candling works is you've got

a 10-inch hollow candle tube,

and that's inserted into your ear

and lit from the other side.

And that's supposed to burn for 15 minutes,

which supposedly creates a vacuum that draws your ear wax

out into the candle.

- [Dan] It's enormous in spa culture. Practitioners

swear by this,

You just lie down, they stick some candles in your ears

and light them on fire, maybe burn some incense.

It feels amazing.

- [Negin] So then after you do the candling,

they like supple it open the candle

and then you can see all this wax that's come out

of your ears and you're like, "Oh my God."

So there's this little like dopamine hit

at the end of like how much wax you were able

to retrieve through this process.

- [Dan] One Seattle candle distributor reportedly sells

over a thousand dollars of candles

every week just for this.

But it turns out sticking a flaming candle in your ear isn't

as good an idea as you might think.

- [Jason] There are issues like punctured eardrums,

or how about this?

Hot wax dripping into your ear.

So that hot wax can now harden inside your ear.

You're trying to get stuff out of your ear,

and in some cases,

you're putting even worse stuff into it.

- [Adam] That's a dangerous scenario to begin with,

and many problems arise.

People have burns to their face, to their neck,

to their upper back.

Hair catches fire, and homes catch fire.

- [Jason] In 1996, there are 21 serious injuries reported

connected to ear candling.

In 2005, a woman's house catches on fire

and she dies because of this.

- [Dan] Which brings us to the ultimate irony.

When you open it up and you find that wax inside,

you're looking at candle wax.

It's just melted candle. Nothing came out of you.

Health experts, including the FDA,

issue all kinds of warnings saying, "Don't do ear candling."

And there are enough injuries and liability suits

that the practice just kind of falls off a cliff.

- We'll just have to keep searching for the perfect way

to remove earwax.

You know,

some problems aren't meant to be solved with an open flame.

- Cowboys, baseball players, and camels all do it.

And back in the day, everyone and their mother was doing it.

And it could end up killing you.

- [Lance] By the mid 1800s, there's a habit that is very

common for everybody in America and that is spitting in public.

If you have a respiratory issue,

if you have phlegm in your lungs,

then people are actually encouraged to expectorate.

And so they're really telling people hock a loogie

and spit it on the ground.

- [Martin] At the same time, chewing tobacco is

incredibly popular.

It achieved a popularity far greater than cigarette smoking.

It came first.

- [Don] Of course, this has a really specific side effect,

a steady stream of brown bitter saliva.

People don't think twice about just spitting anywhere

in streets, saloons, wherever.

It's even seen as a kind of manly gesture.

- Some people, and I've witnessed this myself,

got that technique when they do the two fingers.

They go in the stream, just like a laser jet coming out.

- [Don] Foreign travelers come to these shores

and they remark about how disgusting Americans are

with their constant spitting.

- People are more and more asking like,

"What can we do to cut down on this epidemic

of tobacco spits staining absolutely everything?"

- The solution to this is the spittoon.

A spittoon is a receptacle with a wide mouth,

usually made out of brass

or ceramics to make spitting easier.

- [Lance] By the 1870s in America,

spittoons are pretty much everywhere.

They're basically considered to be a sanitary solution

to the spitting habit.

- [Natalia] In a way though, these spittoons

also cause their own problem

because they legitimize the act of spitting

and they're almost an invitation to spit.

- [Hakeem] You know how dudes are when it comes to a

waste basket?

You got to see how far away you can make that shot.

Imagine doing that with a spittoon.

So this just becomes a nasty spittoon area.

- Cleaning and disposing of the spit

in the spittoons every day also causes its own problem.

The janitor, whoever is going to pick it up is likely going

to spill it everywhere as it goes.

And then what are they doing with it?

Just dumping it into the street or to the river?

- [Lance] Congress had them, and apparently

congressmen were particularly bad at spitting.

So there was actually an official report

in 1898 that said,

"Please improve your behavior.

You're making a grotesque mess that wouldn't be allowed

in a barroom or a mining camp."

And that's the floor of the US Congress.

- [Henry] By the late 1800s,

some realize America's spitting habit is more

than just messy.

- [Hakeem] Around the same time, doctors start warning people

about these things called germs.

And they let them know that it's present in spit.

And horrible diseases like tuberculosis

in particular can be spread this way.

This is the first time a lot

of Americans have heard about germs,

and it's making an impression.

- [Natalia] In 1896, New York City becomes the first major

city to outlaw spitting in public spaces like on sidewalks.

- [Martin] They have ad campaigns that encourage people

not to spit, and one of them features a baby

and it says, "For my sake, don't spit."

Like how you monster?

How could you spit?

Think of the babies you disgusting animal.

- [Henry] What gets Americans to finally leave

this unsanitary but fun practice behind?

Another more tasty chewing product.

- [Don] It's around this time just before the 1920s

that Wrigley's double mint gum becomes wildly popular

alongside their juicy fruit and spirit flavors.

There's a whole host of others.

- [Lance] This is the golden age of chewing gum,

and it replaces tobacco

as a favorite chewing habit for younger generations.

- [Don] And for those who still want that nicotine fix,

the more gentile cigarettes step in.

- Spittoons were gross saliva-filled basins.

But in the mid 1800s,

it was hard to tell your spittoon

from your drinking water.

- In the mid 19th century,

American cities are incredibly filthy.

You have hundreds of thousands of horses dropping manure.

You got people emptying chamber pots.

- [Kavitha] All that waste gets into the groundwater,

which obviously then gets consumed by humans.

So while water is life, bad water can be death.

- [Edward] And there are frequent outbreaks of cholera,

diphtheria,

typhoid, diseases that kill thousands of people in a summer.

- [Henry] At first, people begin turning

to a different kind of liquid to quench their thirst.

Alcohol.

- [Dan] It sounds crazy, but back then, drinking alcohol

was better for you than drinking publicly available water.

- [Brian] The process to make beer sanitizes the water

and it's kegged up and kept safe until you drink it.

So people could go to the bar and in the interest of safety,

drink nice, safe alcohol,

as opposed to poison water.

- Today, the average American drinks around two

and a half gallons of alcohol per year.

Back then, it was way higher.

About four beers or beer equivalents per day.

- [Edward] Both public health advocates

and temperance societies begin to say,

"We need to provide the people with clean, healthy water."

So by the 1870s, it's quite common to see a water fountain

or several water fountains

throughout major cities,

providing fresh water to the masses.

- [Austin] The water can be used for washing your hands

or gathering stuff for cleaning,

and then it flows out into a trough for your pets

and your horses.

But the cleanest water is the one straight

from the spigot at the top.

- [Henry] Clean water for all, right?

But there's just one problem.

How do you drink from the fountain?

- The communal cup, which is exactly what it sounds like.

It is a metal cup attached to a thick chain

on the fountain where you could dip in your cup, drink it,

and then leave it for the next person.

And people loved it.

- [Austin] It's like a modern day water cooler,

except instead of a paper cup that you throw out

after you have a sip, everyone gets the same cup.

- [Henry] But turns out,

they're sharing more than just a cup.

- [Dan] A physician from Kansas named Dr. Samuel Crumbine is

on a train when he sees a child drink

from a communal cup right after a tuberculosis patient.

And that's when he realizes this whole sharing cups thing

seems like a terrible idea.

- [Kavitha] He realizes that these communal cups are

basically ground zero for spreading disease.

Everything from tuberculosis to typhoid to dysentery.

- [Edward] So Crumbine launches this campaign to ban the cup.

And they often use provocative cartooning showing,

for example, the grim reaper at one

of these fountains handing the cup to a child,

you know, the kiss of death.

- [Austin] Despite initial public perception

and backlash, by 1915, Crumbine's campaign has worked.

The communal cup is nearly gone.

- [Dan] Today, it seems obvious.

Hey, that person's coughing up blood.

Maybe they shouldn't be sharing a drinking cup

with the whole town.

And it didn't take long for people to figure it out,

but it did take longer than you would hope.

- I guess good hygiene meant something different back then.

- Remember going to the school nurse with a cut?

That antiseptic stung like crazy.

There had to be a better way.

And actually, there was, a solution that dates back

to the 1920s, as long as you didn't mind a touch of poison.

- [Austin] After World War I, soldiers return home

with firsthand accounts of this thing that helped them get

through cuts and scrapes, iodine.

- [Don] Iodine is great at killing germs, but civilians

and kids especially quickly learn the stuff really burns.

So thank you very much.

I'll take the life-threatening infection instead.

- [Henry] But it turns out there's actually

a much less painful antiseptic in the works.

- [Rutledge] Around the same time,

a urologist named Hugh H. Young

is trying to develop a solution

for infections that happen in your downstairs,

your nether regions, if you will.

Especially people with gonorrhea.

The clap is a big problem during World War I.

- [Natalia] But even though Americans aren't involved in the

fighting of World War I for that long,

they are in the war long enough to rack up 383,000 cases

of venereal disease, most of which are gonorrhea.

- [Rutledge] What Young came up with,

he called Mercurochrome 220,

which is very effective at killing germs.

- [Natalia] And it doesn't sting at all.

This is very important when you're using it topically

in the urethra, which is such a sensitive area.

- [Don] Young partners with a pharmaceutical firm

and they bring it to market

as a topical antiseptic for cuts and wounds.

The idea is if this stuff is gentle enough

for extremely sensitive areas, then it's going

to be gentle enough for kids anywhere on their bodies.

It'll be great for families.

- [Austin] Mercurochrome ads really play this up.

They say children will not hesitate

to report their injuries

when Mercurochrome is your household antiseptic

because they know it won't hurt you.

- [Don] When you scraped your knee

or did anything in the backyard,

the first thing your mom would do would paint

that little red liquid on the booboo.

You know, like that was the way you were going to heal.

Of course.

- [Martin] This was like a weekly part of my life

as a child.

You got a cut, spread some Mercurochrome on it,

because that was their answer to everything.

Oh, you cut yourself here. Splat.

- [Don] I really remember Mercurochrome

as it doesn't sting,

therefore it must be good.

It was a trusty product.

And that little scrape that was covered

with red was a badge of honor.

You'd had a good time.

- [Henry] If Mercurochrome is so effective

and popular, why don't we still use it?

- It turns out the mer

in Mercurochrome stands for merbromin,

which contains mercury.

- [Don] Mercury is really bad stuff.

It damages the nervous system, internal organs,

not to mention, it makes you crazy.

- [Martin] Any contact with mercury on your bare skin

is toxic.

It's even worse if it's

an exposed piece of skin from a cut.

And then what are people doing?

They're slathering Mercurochrome on that.

They're introducing mercury into an open wound.

- [J Mack] A bottle of Mercurochrome has about a half a

gram of mercury in it, which doesn't sound like a lot.

But if you're a child having this lathered all

over your body, getting inside of these cuts,

it can give you a thousand times a dose

that a human adult can handle.

- [Martin] We're basically just dosing children

for average everyday cuts with mercury.

Like you fall down, scrape your knee. Mercury.

Oh, you cut yourself, you got a paper cut. Mercury.

Over and over again. Here's some poison to treat that wound.

- [Austin] In the 1970s and '80s,

there is a lot of concern about mercury content.

There's mercury in our fish,

in some other chemicals that we utilize.

So Mercurochrome's got to go.

- [Natalia] Newer antiseptics also work just as well,

and they're not made from mercury.

- [Rutledge] What's wild is that it's not till the '90s when

the FDA finally says, "You know, mercury is pretty bad for you.

I guess we should stop letting people spread it all

over themselves."

And that's when they finally banned it.

- [Natalia] You might still see a product using the name

Mercurochrome but unless it's from your grandfather's dusty

old cabinet, chances are it does not contain mercury.

- [Don] Little did I know that I would be carrying this mercury

in my body, but it didn't sting,

and that's the important part.

- For generations,

Americans used Mercurochrome to clean up cuts.

It just took us a little longer

to clean up the Mercurochrome.

- Everybody knows regular bathing is essential

for good hygiene.

But in the old days, a bath was often less beneficial

and more of a biohazard.

- [Natalia] In the mid 1800s, bathing regularly,

much less with clean water,

is not really a priority for most Americans.

In rural areas, if you wanted to get clean,

you would maybe jump in a lake

or you would use an animal trough,

which meant that you were bathing

in like 90% horse saliva.

- [Edward] To bathe in a rural environment

meant that you had to go to

the river or to the well and get gallon

after gallon of ice cold water, bring it inside,

and then spend a ton of money on wood

to get it heated up enough

so that someone would have at least warm water

in order to bathe themselves.

And then people in the family, starting with dad,

he would go first, then mom, then the children,

all down the line, reusing the water.

- Spare a though for the youngest

of the family that had to sit in that human chowder

and think that that was taking a bath.

- Things are worse in the cities.

In the late 1800s,

individual apartments don't have running water.

And typically there's only one spout

per floor that would have to serve something

like 20 different apartments.

And that spout has one temperature, cold.

- [Adam] In tenements very often, people would have a basin

and they would use a sponge

and it was like a cold water sponge bath.

- This is why city dwellers

get the nickname The Great Unwashed.

So city living required some shame swallowing.

- [Henry] Due to poor sanitation,

diseases like cholera and typhoid are on the rise.

So in 1870, New York City officials come up

with an innovative way to bring good hygiene to the masses.

They call them floating baths.

- [Adam] When you look at the photos of the floating baths,

it's really kind of amazing.

There are these massive 95 by 60-foot sort of wooden frames

that are on barges or just tethered to a dock,

and anyone could get a nice 20-minute soak.

- [Natalia] These floating baths are really popular.

The first one in Manhattan services 4,500 people a day.

Soon after, Brooklyn has five floating baths,

and they bathe one million people per summer.

- [Edward] I think if I was alive at the time,

I would've absolutely been in one of those pools

because it is sweltering in New York City.

There's no air conditioning.

People don't have electric fans. It's so refreshing.

It's fun.

You're there with your family, your friends, your children.

It's a great way to fight the heat

and fight the filth at the same time.

- [Hakeem] But the big problem is that the water

in the floating bath is the river water,

and that water was gross.

- [Adam] The water that is going

into these baths is not from some below ground aquifer.

It's not being brought in from Saratoga.

It's not going through a desalination process.

It's the same funky fetid water from the river itself.

Basically, the tubs have slats in them.

So what feeds the bath? It's the same river water.

- The Environmental Protection Agency is not established

for like another century.

So the waterfront industries like slaughterhouses just use

the river as a dumping ground.

So they're putting bones and organs

and animal carcasses just right in there.

- [Adam] Tanneries put animal hides into really toxic

chemicals to dissolve any hairs

or anything that are on the skin itself.

We're not talking about some kind of soap.

They're tossing in lime. They're tossing in arsenic.

- [Hakeem] And also, you have street runoff,

and it's the time that they're using horses.

So it's full of manure

and other just nasty stuff that's

on the surface of the city.

- [Adam] So while you're there soaking for hygiene,

you're also in this revolting stew of lime, arsenic,

rotting animals, poop, metal, and glass.

Fantastic.

- [Edward] As the health hazards associated

with these public baths become more

and more evident, public health officials start

to see there's more of a downside than an upside.

And so public health officials begin to argue

for the closure of these baths.

But the huddled masses in the tenement districts,

they oppose this because they really like these things.

- [Negin] Even though the river baths were real gross and filthy

and full of disease, people were committed

and they were not fully shut down until the 1940s.

So those things really stuck around.

- Remembering all the things we once thought were

perfectly sanitary, from splinters in our toilet paper,

to fire in our ears, to barbers who just took

off a smidge on the side, and your left leg.

Good hygiene could be dirty work,

but that's what made our hazardous history