Timeline for Was it known in ancient Rome and Greece that boiling water made it safe to drink and if so, what was the theory behind this?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
11 events
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| Jun 17 at 13:02 | comment | added | T.E.D.♦ | Fun fact: Even into the mid modern period, Italian doctors were still going with a variant of Hippocrates theory, that there was "bad air" (or in Italian: "mala aria", shortened to "malaria") causing disease, particularly around swamps. That was where the name for the disease came from. | |
| Jun 12 at 17:04 | comment | added | cmw | There's definitely a lot Aristotle got wrong. Logic will only take you so far if you've built your case on bad premises. | |
| Jun 12 at 16:41 | comment | added | user121330 | Neither filtering nor boiling will remove the salt from seawater. That Aristotle guy would have been a lot smarter if he'd just googled that. | |
| Jun 11 at 14:29 | comment | added | Barmar | In general, foul taste is associated with harmful effects, because our senses of taste and smell evolved to help us distinguish good foods from bad. So it was natural for them to associate the improved taste of purified water with health benfits. | |
| Jun 11 at 11:57 | comment | added | Peter LeFanu Lumsdaine | On how people might have discovered this without germ theory: Many harmful contaminants are easily perceptible by sight, taste, or smell, and it’s easy to discover (by accident or guesswork) that filtering and boiling can perceptibly improve these. (Anyone who’s been wild-camping can confirm this.) It’s a natural guess (under most theories of the mechanism, or just as trial and error) then that the boiling will also improve water that’s bad in less-obvious ways. | |
| Jun 10 at 22:22 | vote | accept | releseabe | ||
| Jun 10 at 18:07 | history | edited | cmw | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jun 10 at 17:51 | history | edited | cmw | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jun 10 at 16:42 | comment | added | Adam Hyland | It absolutely answers the question. Note that referring to rainwater he says "such waters are naturally the best. But..." I think we can safely infer that water which is less good (ie not the best) also should be boiled. | |
| Jun 10 at 15:05 | history | edited | cmw | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jun 10 at 14:53 | history | answered | cmw | CC BY-SA 4.0 |