[Sca-cooks] Water Purity was: Mustards

[Jeff Gedney]

>Stefan, how could they have generally known about health
>hazards of water in the Renaissance?  In Holland, about
>1595 the microscope was invented by Zacharias Jansenn
>(his business was grinding lenses for eyeglasses).  Later,
>Anton van Leeuwenhoek began to make microscopes as a hobby.
>

Mankind has always had a reasonably good tool to tell if water is basically unhealthy, the nose...

Seriously. It was well known that the effluvia of the open sewers was unheathy. mostly because it stinks. And we have a very sensible and evolutionarily derived aversion response to the odors of biological effluvia. 

And anyone who put up water in a keg, (sailors did this all the time) knew that streams that ran fresh from the spring lasted longer before going all scummy and maloderous, than did water in rivers that served cities. There are a number of references where the captain was searching for good "sweet" water for putting up in kegs, and specifically not taking river water that was considered fouled. 
They could see and smell that the water went foul (or was already foul) without having to know about the sundrie bacteria and algaes that made it that way. 

They also knew that beer lasted longer than water in the keg.
They did not have to know that boiling the water in beermaking killed the organisms therein to know this. 

Empiricism did not purely start up in the 1700's with Leewanhoek and LaVoisier.

The senses, physical and common, were enough to make the necessary observations.
 
Capt Elias
-Renaissance Geek of the Seven Seas

--------------------------------------------------------------
If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather 
wood, divide the work, and give orders.  Instead, teach them
to yearn for the vast and endless sea. 
  - Antoine de Saint Exupery