Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: The Chicago River Reversal

Episode Date: December 28, 2019

This week on Sawbones, the incredible true story of how Chicago changed the direction of a river to battle typhoid and cholera. Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers

Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. Sobs. We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth. You're worth it. We can't wait. Oh, right. What time is it about? To books. One, two, one, good day for our family. I'm your co-host Justin Mac McAroy. Yeah. Yeah.

And I'm Sydney McAroy. Yeah. Okay. That's actually only weird because a bunch of you promised me before that you would cheer louder for me. So I guess you rethought it. Huh. Alright, I'll remember that.

Dylan. Don't put people on blast at the beginning of the show. That's the wrong answer. Dylan knows what he did. He's skulking out of the theater. I'm so excited. Pants fell down. Now who's the idiot?

Dylan. All right, are you done yelling at Dylan? Yeah. I apologize, Dylan. I can't do anything with him. I am so excited to be here. We mentioned before we came to Chicago that we needed topics related to Chicago.

And I got so many suggestions. You all been sick a lot. It was great. I was overwhelmed. I was inundated with suggestions. Now, the majority of them were about maloort. Which is great. It's not, but that was great.

I don't think I could, I don't know how I would do an entire show about that. But I felt like we had to mention it first. Okay. We had to at least talk briefly. Because when I said, wow, Justin, most of the suggestions we got were about maloort, I felt like you didn't really understand why. I said, I do a medical history podcast What should I talk about in Chicago and people were like liquor this liquor?

Talk about this it's bad talk about it Did you I have no you still not I never told you still don't know why still know why? It's funny because we were talking about it backstage and Travis said it seems like the kind of thing that probably like was secretly sold during prohibition Because it tasted so bad people thought it was like medicine, but it wasn't Which is exactly Exactly right You like retcon to that in the history that it's exactly right about Malore So it was brought to Chicago by Carl Jepsen,

a Swedish immigrant. Carly Rae's great, great, damn partner. And it's based on a Swedish basketball decor, which is different kinds of herbal liquor drinks, except this one is made with just wormwood, like absinthe. So like this was even when absinthe was illegal for years and years and years, you could still get malor which also has wormwood in it, which is kind of strange. But that's probably why it doesn't taste so great

because it's like super bitter. And usually, I guess with this laquor, they put other stuff in there, but Japson was like, no way. All I'm putting in there is the warm wood, and it is going to be so bitter. And also, the rumor was that he was a really heavy smoker and had just like destroyed his taste buds. And so for him, he was like, I can taste it. That's a plus. Like the observer eating really spicy food on French. So he would indeed.

Thanks French heads. Both of you. I'm there with you. I love French. It was just entertaining you. I don't care what you think. I love it. So he would indeed sell his malort out of a suitcase on the sidewalk. Just regular, just a regular drink. No, it was a medicine. That's even better. Here's a medicine I'm selling out of my suitcase on the sidewalk, but it's medicine, not alcohol. It just happens to have alcohol in it. And the story is that when police officers would come by during prohibition and be like, now, is that really medicine or are you just selling booze?

He'd say, try some. And they would take a drink and go, okay, that's gotta be medicine because who would ever drink that for fun? Of course, our friend John Hodgman is a big fan of Millor. And that was our introduction. Well, at least that was mine, my introduction to Millor. And he describes it as tasting like pencil shavings

and heartbreak, I believe. I think that's yeah, that's an accurate description. The of course, Melort is still around for all your stunt drinking needs. Not for medicinal purposes anymore. I don't think it it doesn't do anything for you medicinally. The label though, this is the last thing I'll say about more, the label used to be, you said this big long, I guess, add on it. It doesn't anymore, but what the label from a lore used to say, and I just had to mention this, it says, most first time drinkers of Jebson, Malore reject our liquor liquor. Its strong, sharp taste is not for everyone.

Our liquor is rugged and unrelenting, even brutal to the palate. During almost 60 years of American distribution, we found only one out of 49 men will drink Jeppeson, Mallor. During the lifetime of our founder, Carl Jepsen was apt to say, my my Lord is produced for that unique group of drinkers who disdain light flavor or neutral spirits. It is not possible to forget our two fisted liquor. The taste just lingers and lasts seemingly forever. The first shot is hard to swallow, persevere, make it past two shot glasses, and with a third you could be hours forever. Which is great.

It's great. I love you Chicago, it still tastes bad. I feel like two-thirds of the fast food industry is doing this exact policy, right? We know it's frigging gross, but go ahead, need it anyway, nasty. But that's not the, as I said, I couldn't find a way to make an entire show about malort. But I did find a story that multiple people suggested, thank you to Ella, Hannah, and Christian, if any of you are here, that this was a great story about

the time that Chicago reversed the flow of its river, which I had no idea about this, and as a person who I'm not an engineer, I was never particularly good at physics or geography or anything related to this. I found fascinating. And it is related to health care and medicine. That was the primary reason. But I wanted to get into the story of how and why Chicago decided that the Chicago River should flow the other direction.

So I don't know where one could just decide this. I didn't know either. I know I read that. And I thought, well, how do you do that? I want to tell you how you do it. OK, sorry. I shouldn't interrupt. So the river used to flow into Lake Michigan,

of course, now it flows out the other direction and joins the Mississippi River system. Back in the mid-late, 1800s, when it all flowed the other direction, Chicago was growing. The population of Chicago was just doubling and doubling. And more and more people were moving in. And as more and more people are moving into the city, there were businesses moving in and a lot of animals,

things like stockyards being built. And all of these people and animals and factories and businesses were dumping all of their people and animal and factory waste into the river. So the river was getting really nasty. And you can read about that. That is not the primary purpose of the book, but if you've read the jungle, by Uptons and Claire,

which that could have been a whole other show. It's here there. That's about us. Absolutely. It's about the dangers of the meat packing industry in the late 1800s. But he described the water as well as all the other really gross things in the book. You can also read about the water quality. And he talks about how like the river, there were parts of it that were so filled with like animal bits and Leftover stuff and waste that the surface of the water was semi-solid

It was said that like a chicken could walk across it Maybe a human But you don't want to try But maybe there is a particularly bad stretch that Maybe a human, but you don't want to try. But maybe. There is a particularly bad stretch that Sinclair referred to as the Great Open Sewer, but this particular stretch was known as Bubbly Creek

by locals, still called that, is my understanding. And it's actually, and it was bubbly because of all the methane from all the decomposing things in the bottom bubbling up To the top and it's still I guess the cleanup effort is still underway to fix bubbly creek Although it does look way better than it did in the pictures. I've been I've been researching on the internet. Keep out of it. Yeah So now all this Yeah, once it's not bugged anymore.

Nice creek. Or perhaps good creek. Clean creek. Can eat the fish here now. Delicious creek. Don't eat the fish there now. But later. So the fact that all of this was floating in the river

was, I mean, it was unpleasant, probably, if you lived there at the time. If you looked out the river and there were like gross, you know, there was human waste, like open human waste, just floating down the river. You could say, dookie, you're a doctor. There was, there was dookie. So, and like even sometimes,

because of all the grease and stuff on the surface of the water, it would like catch fire, which... Which was good, because that got rid of of all the grease and stuff on the surface of the water, it would like catch fire Which which was good because that got rid of some of the dookie And the what the lake the creek would be on fire would be like nice good That's gonna get a lot of the bad stuff That's probably like I'll try that actually said on fire I mean, try that, actually. Set on fire. Oh, take care of it.

I don't do that, please. No, that's scary and surreal probably. And also not great for tourism or citysummon grow. Yeah, except awesome for tourism. If YouTube existed back then, that would be the whole thing. Like, hey, guys, I'm here. I'm taking the Bubbly Creek Challenge. I'm going to walk across it. Don't forget to like, hey guys, I'm here, I'm taking the Bubbly Creek Challenge, I'm gonna walk across it.

Don't forget to like, smash that like. Hey, what's up, I'm here recapping my top 10 Bubbly Creek Fails. The first one I fell a huge pile of dookie, it was on fire. My boy Slammo filmed it, he thought it was hilarious. Is that what that blippy guy does? That's what blippy does. And that's what blippy does. But more importantly than how it looked really gross, that's not good for your health.

If the water is that, is that gross and all that stuff that's floating in it, people knew better than to drink that water. We didn't know a lot about germs and how diseases were spread quite yet at this point in history. But we at least knew enough to say that water is brown. And there are like sludgy things in it. And that looks like part of a pig. I'm not going to drink that water.

So we knew that. But what we didn't quite understand is that all that stuff was going into the river, flowing down the river into the lake, where we definitely were getting our drinking water from. And so everybody was drinking the water from the lake, but it was being constantly polluted by the river. And as more and more people moved in, and there was more and more waste in the river, more and more was going into the lakes, people started to get really worried about this. At the time, there were already like yearly outbreaks of cholera and typhoid and dysentery. And while, again, people didn't quite understand all the connection as to what

did I just do that made me so sick, They knew something about the water was the problem. And they knew that the more of this stuff that was flowing into the lake, the more danger they were in. At the time, you actually would buy your water from like a water peddler who would come door to door with like, I have fresh lake Michigan water from you. For you, I tried to get it further away from the river wake wake And I should say again a lot of this was still based on the miasma theory of disease

And this is why the solutions they came up with at first didn't always make a lot of sense. And the miasma theory of disease was that if something like smells bad, if there's a gross thing there, then it's like emanating these fumes that will make you sick. And so if you dump some waste in the river, and it's just there, that's bad. But if you can just kind of flush it on down away from you, you're fine. So initially the thought was, okay, we're gonna have to fix this. We need to get all this sewage that's just sort of like sitting out in the river

around people where we're living. We need to get it away from us. How can we do that? So they turned to a guy, Ellis Sylvester Chezborough. That's a name. I knew you would enjoy that name. I found it. I thought just love it. I'm Ellis or whatever this cat's planning. I'm in. And his first idea seems kind of obvious. He said, what about a sewer? Y'all ahead. Okay. Perhaps we should have one. I've seen them in Europe. They're fantastic.

They're amazing. I hope build one in Boston. Let's get one. You know how he put the duke in the river? Get this. Tubes for it. But where did the tubes go? I don't know.

Well, let me in the tubes in Europe. I just know there are tubes. The duke goes away. We're going to get to that. Well, they won't let me have the tubes in Europe. I just know there are tubes. And the dookie goes away. We're going to get to that. That was part of the problem. I just have to say, though, I have to say, though, that when this sounded very simple, we'll just

go underneath all the roads and build pipes and carry all the poop away from people's homes and whatever, and then we'll be fine. Except they were depending on gravity to do the work, which meant that it had to flow down. But the town was like on the level of the river and the lake and everything basically. So there was no gravity to work with. So Chesborough said, well, I think we're just gonna have to raise the city. Just like, lift it all up. Which is exactly what you all did. Which is why they just raise the whole freaking city.

Like, anywhere from two feet to eight feet in some areas, just like dredged up like clay and dirt from bottom of the river and dumped it on the roads until it was like, well, my bottom floor is now my cellar. I'm moving to the second floor because that's where the road is. I now understand why y'all thought you could get away with mixing cheese and caramel popcorn together. You spat, you spat in God's face and lived to tell the tale. Now you're cock-shored and think you can handle anything. I love it. The whole city is like an active defiance

in the face of nature and I'm so here for it. I love it. I love it. So they raised the whole city, and that must have been such a bummer if you didn't have a jack under your house, which they literally did. They jacked up some of the houses up to street level. So they raised the whole city, and they built the sewer, and they're like, this is fantastic, except where did the pipes go? Into the lake.

So it's kind of like a fun water slide for a dookie. But the splash down is the same place. So then Chesborough is like, new idea. We're going to build a tunnel way down under the city. And it's going to go way out into the lake, like two miles out, and from there, we'll collect the drinking water. So like it, the drinking water will go in the tunnel

at this end and flow all the way up to the city on this end. And so all the pollution is going out right, right where the river met the lake, but like the drinking water's coming from out here, so we're probably cool. So they did, over the course of three years, they built this giant tunnel and Got all the water from further out in the lake and for a while that seemed like a good solution. Everybody was like this looks good

The water is very brown here, but out there it looks pretty good And that's where the tube is. So we're fine But again the city was growing and growing and growing and the more people the more waste the more fear there was that that waste was getting pushed further and further out the pollution was extending farther and what if it was going to get in the drinking water and again there were still these periodic outbreaks of disease especially after a heavy rain and this is where the story gets a little murky. So... But I'm... So in 1885, there was a huge rain storm, and this part is definitely true. There was a huge rain storm in Chicago.

And the river flooded, and the lake flooded, there was just water everywhere, way more rain than anybody predicted. And the story that was told many, many years after is that because there was so much extra water and everything got shoved out towards the pipe where the drinking water came in, that there were huge outbreaks of cholera and typhoid and dysentery following this giant rainfall and that everybody got sick and numbers like 90,000 people died that year of these diseases. And this is what this this event and then the some more outbreaks that followed really spurred this idea like we've got to do something else. There has to be a better way. And back in 1871, Chesborough had been really inspired by an accidental reversal of the

flow of the river. There had been, they had been digging out a different canal and they had added some extra water to the river and they had accidentally in this whole process temporarily reverse the flow of the river. And when he saw that happen and everybody saw that happen just for a brief period of time, he back then had said, I think our only solution is to change the direction this river flows. Because then we'd get all this clean lake water coming in, all the pollution would just keep on going downstream.

To somewhere. We have literally no way of knowing where. And then all this stuff we're dumping in the river will be someone else's problem, namely St. Louis. It would be St. Louis's problem. And so because of that that happened years ago and like Chesborough had suggested it, even though at this point he was no longer actually by the time this project starts, Chesborough has died.

There you go. There you go, I'm sad. No, I just... Sidney likes to follow everybody's historical story until they meet the rigger. I don't know why, but we got him. I mean, did you think he was still alive? No, I'm just glad we get hit.

He's 92 right now. You just don't let anybody fade away back into the history books. You know what I mean? Well, I've done my part. They have to walk him right to their grave. Well, it was people. Push them right in.

But after his death, his idea lived on, and in 1892, they began the construction of a canal. The idea was that we're going to connect to the Chicago River, to the Desplanes River. And when we do that, all the water's going to start flowing that direction and eventually join the Mississippi River system. And when we do that, all the water is going to start flowing that direction and eventually join the Mississippi River system, and this is great. And instead of us contaminating our own drinking water, we're just going to be making things really bad for everything

downstream. And we don't care about that because we live here. And so they began building the Chicago Sanitarian Ship Canal. And it would take a lot longer than they expected for a couple of reasons. First of all, it was really hard to do that. They had to dig a lot. They had to invent steam-powered digging machines to do that.

The technology that was created for this project was actually all used years later for the Panama Canal, which was all like the foundation for the building of the Panama Canal, all that technology was developed. So that would like slow things down, but the other reason is because cities downstream hearing about what Chicago was doing were like, Can you not? Uh, that Chicago guy did a huge blanket over the whole thing. Every time St. Louis came by, like, I had a lot of digging. Like, no, I don't think so.

So it became a court battle. Uh, St. Louis was like, um, I don't think we don't, we would rather you don't do this. And Chicago was arguing, listen, the police. Free water. They were arguing that, well, one, they did argue, like, we're going to have this influx of all this clean lake water, so that's fine. And it's going to get down to your city eventually,

so that's good. And two, the pollution is going to be so diluted. You won't even notice it. It's like it's not even there. Actually, that was their rallying cry. The solution to pollution is dilution. We'll just dilute the waste out. And St. Louis was arguing like, okay, I don't know if that's true or not, but I even diluted

human feces. It's not great So could you keep that in Chicago, please? Thank you and it was moving very slowly through the courts like St. Louis had actually gone to the Supreme Court and said like Could you please stop them? They're just they're digging and digging and Eventually this is gonna happen and someone please stop them. Please reason for Chicago. So in 1899, they specifically went to this Supreme Court and asked them for an injunction.

And even though it was moving slowly, there was a lot of fear by the end of the year that the court was actually gonna hand down, at least a temporary injunction to say, like, let's look into this a little bit more. And halfway, rerouting a river is nothing. Like, you halfway turn the other direction, you haven't done anything really. It's just stopped.

It's a skinny lake. The Chicago knew they had to act fast. They had to reverse this river because by the year 1900, Chicago had over like a million and a half people living here. So it had grown very large and the river was very gross and something had to be done. So before the courts could decide one way or the other, on January 2, of 1900, in the early morning hours, this is really how this was done. A group of people from the sanitary district in Chicago and some of the engineers and government people

and their wives and friends went down to the last dam. The last dam that was holding back the river before it joined the desplanes. They went to the dam and decided we're going to break it down ourselves. We're going to do it. We're not going to announce it. We're not going to tell the press. They had like one photographer there. They had like one, they told like one guy like, listen, I'm going to give you the exclusive, but don't tell St. Louis. Don't, don't put on Instagram. You know they'll see it. Because they'll definitely come stop us because this isn't strictly legal.

So they went and it took them, it should be really cool, like they showed up and they went at it first just with their shovels. They were like, yes, we're doing this. We're reversing, they're doing it. That didn't work, the shovels didn't work. It was very cold, there was lots of ice. There was clay, I mean, it was hard to break through the dam and everything.

So they tried with shovels for a while, they tried with their big steam powered machines. None of this was working very well. So eventually they had to start throwing dynamite at it. There it is. It took quite a while, but they did indeed break the dam. And they reversed the flow of the river. And so at that point, even though Missouri is still fighting

this and trying to get the Supreme Court to do something, the river is now flowing the other direction. So it's going to be a lot harder to stop. And it wasn't even until 1906, so six years later, that finally the Supreme Court kind of weighs in. And Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes says, I think it's fine. It's been six years.

Who remembers what direction it was going in the first place? He said, he said, look, I've looked at the Mississippi, and you're right, it's nasty. So maybe that did happen because of what Chicago did, but there are also a lot of other cities dumping their waste into the river, so we can't blame it all on Chicago. So I don't know, and maybe all that Lakewater

is a good thing, really. If I was the judge, I'd be like, listen, if you're so mad about it, why don't you do like Chicago did? Make it go the opposite direction. Back to Chicago. This is how we handle River Law in America now. It's just who's the toughest,

who can make the river flow back at the other people. This is its chaos out there. I have to imagine the fact that like they'd already done it weighed heavily on this decision. Right. So the river now flowed the other direction. There was definitely a noticeable difference pretty quickly in just like the appearance of the river because everything was going down to St. Louis now was their problem. They of course had to take other measures over the years to like eventually stop dumping like

raw sewage into the river. So that's a bad idea even if it is going to St. Louis. You don't want to do that. But it was, it was touted as one of the greatest like engineering achievements in the history of, you know, mankind as we reverse the flow of a river. Now my understanding from reading a lot about this is that it has created some problems now other than the whole thing about making St. Louis your toilet. Which is not very nice. It is allowed for invasive species, Asian carp are now coming in. I guess a lot of money is spent trying to keep those and zebra mussels out of the Mississippi River system.

So there are other problems. And I even read somebody suggesting maybe we should flip it back, which seems like, well, that would probably be a lot easier now. But the real kicker to this whole story is that a lot of it was based on this idea that so many people were dying of these infectious diseases right before the river reversal, that there was no other choice. You just had to do it, right?

It was for the good of the people of the city. And there's even a story that goes with one of the guys who was sitting there hammering away at the dam with a shovel, was crying as he watched the water finally break through because he lost both of his parents to cholera. And so he's finally stopping the scourge of these diseases. And so it was all this very like, we have to do this

for the people of Chicago. But the real kicker is that that big outbreak of cholera and typhoid and dysentery in 1885 that killed 90,000 people never happened. It is completely a myth. Y'all. Did you just really hate St. Louis? That's like the meanest.

That's like such a mean prank to do. I mean, they're definitely were cases of them. I'm not saying nobody got cholera, but if 90,000 people had died at that point, it would have been like 12% of the population. There would have been some news stories, you would think, one or two. And in all honesty, there were actually fewer deaths that year of those diseases than in typical years.

Oh, no. The last big outbreak of cholera had been back in 1867. There really wasn't a big one since then. And typhoid deaths were about the same every year. So these were problems. And getting clean water, of course, was very important.

But this huge outbreak that had to spur everybody to action is completely false. It's such a big myth that there's an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to the myth of the Chicago 1885 cholera outbreak that never happened. I guess it came from in the 1950s, there was some other sort of like river project that people were trying to get pushed through and there was some resistance and they were like well we don't want to face another situation back in you know 85 when like like 90,000 people died or something like that. Remember that? And everybody was like what? Huh? And there was no internet so nobody could check. And everybody's like did you hear that? Did you know that? I

didn't know that. I missed it. No. I thought I had heard about a lot of people dying, but I just assumed, wow. There's a, I found all of this fascinating. And if you do too, there's a great book that I've read quite a bit of just to do this episode called

The Chicago River, A Natural and Unnatural History by Libby Hill, which is if you're interested in this, it's been a fascinating book, so. Yeah. I just had to mention. It's okay, too, if you feel too guilty to read it, because you're like, sorry, my grandpa made up the cholera.

Sorry about all our grandpa's. Thank you so much for having us here in your beautiful city, Chicago. I say, I say leave the river however it is. We're having us here in your beautiful city, Chicago. Yeah. Yeah. I say, I say leave the river however it is. You all broke down the dams. It's your river now. Thank you, also, for having me.

It's a dam belong to St. Louis too. Oh, man, guys, her dam. Thank you for also, you all have the best children's museum that at least I have been Don and a very good margarita bill. Yes. Yes We and we go to a lot of children's museums All of them. Yes. All of them. So Thanks to taxpayers for the use of our song medicines is the intro and outro of our program

Um, we are going to do my brood. You know, the advice one. Here in a second, maybe you have questions that you'd like us to answer. You can send those to live at mbmbam.com. And in the subject line, you're going to put your name and seat number, and in the body, one sentence question, advice, please, that we can help with. And we'll, you know, bring somebody up to the mic, friends.

That is going to do it for us for this week, Sidster. So, until next week, my name is Justin McElroy. And Sidney McElroy. And as always, don't, Joe Hole in your head! Thank you. you