Soren Kierkegaard

south and west stemming from rotten seaweed, among other things;...
from the north and east coming from the tanneries, from old, rotting butch-
ers’ wares, from stagnant gutters, fish blood, swamps, match factories, latrine
dumps, and all the other storehouses of filth and pestilence that inundate
Copenhagen—one would think that the city government would not need
to be informed of the ravages of cholera in [the Polish city of] Kalisz in
order to be reminded of the necessity of doing something in the face of
such extraordinary circumstances.”
Copenhagen was a genuine bacteria bomb, but no one really took the
admonition seriously. Animals were permitted inside the city limits, and
according to a survey carried out in 1840, there were 2,777 horses, 1,450
cows, 739 pigs, plus countless numbers of chickens living in Copenhagen.
On Rosengaarden, the distiller Cadovius in fact erected a stall for twenty
cows. He fed them on the nutrient-rich dregs, the by-product of his distill-
ing operation, but since he had no use for the cows’ by-product, he unhesi-
tatingly constructed a conduit leading directly into the gutter of his street.
It is not known how many dogs were a part of this menagerie, but most of
them had no owners and walked on the wild side, especially when they
ventured up onto the city’s ramparts, which were patrolled by a so-called
rampart rifleman charged with neutralizing every four-legged proletarian.
Also typical of public sanitation (or lack of same) was the city employee,
with an annual salary of one hundred rixdollars, who was charged with the
removal of carrion from the city’s public grounds, streets, and alleys. The
city was strikingly foul and suffered from such a lack of public toilets that
in theDansk Folkeblad, H. N. Clausen, the professor of theology, fumed
over the “disfiguring and defilement ”one encountered increasingly in
every street in Copenhagen. The article made an impression on the Hygiene
Commission, which in 1852 tried a sort of experimental arrangement on
Slotsholmen, erecting a pair of pissoirs that were so tiny that in daily par-
lance they were referred to as “urine cases.”
When the tanners up in Rosenborggade washed out their tubs in the
gutter—which they did four or five times a day—the stinking water found
its way slowly down toward Frederiksborggade, across Kultorvet and along
Købmagergade, then across Strøget, and finally meandered across Højbro
Plads to splash into the canal that surrounded Slotsholmen. Almost eighty
kilometers of gutters, with a total surface area of close to three thousand
square meters, ran through the city, but since the slope was far from suffi-
cient, the stinking water rarely made it all the way to the outfall and instead
seeped slowly into the ground. Furthermore, under the city’s houses were
the notorious cellar sumps, where water would collect after a sudden rain-
storm or whenever the water table rose. Cellar sumps had to be pumped