“Polluted and Insalubrious Air”: Environment, Pollution, and Sanitation in Vilnius in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

The article examines how the Neo-Hippocratic idea—that foul airs rising from street refuse, the sick, and the dead caused illness—developed in Vilnius during the second half of the eighteenth century, and what measures were taken by the city’s elites to respond to this problem. The study focuses on three distinct segments of the city’s space that were associated with pollution: streets, squares, and other public spaces clogged with dung and refuse, hospitals overflowing with patients, as well as burial crypts and cemeteries around the city’s churches where decomposing bodies were believed to emit “noxious fumes.” Drawing on a wide range of primary sources—including the documents of the city’s council, health care reform and poor relief records of various institutions, sermons, newspapers, and didactic treatises—the research reveals that “foul air” alarmed both secular elites and the Catholic clergy. The measures taken to combat the problem were aimed at physically removing pollution sources from the city. Dung and other refuse gathered from public spaces were transported to dumping sites outside the city. A new general hospital in the Lukiškės suburb relocated patients with sexually transmitted diseases, as well as the poor and beggars, from densely populated areas. A suburban cemetery was established to reduce burials in church crypts and urban graveyards. Thus, the Neo-Hippocratic environmental ideas significantly reshaped both the daily lives of Vilnius’s inhabitants and the city’s physical landscape.