And now for something incredibly boring and mundane.
For my Uni course I've had to read about the history of London, particularly the 1800s where they had no sewers, everybody flushed their crap into the Thames river, which infected the water table that people were also drinking from, and dying of cholera.
The government didn't do shit about it (literally, hehe) until the Great Stink event during the unusually hot summer of 1858, where the smell of the sewage coming...