Clean up Rome

Say you went back in time to ancient Rome say 100CE. Say you wanted to help the locals so you got the power of a chef Sanitation Officer. What could you do to significantly clean up Roman Sanitation?
 
Say you went back in time to ancient Rome say 100CE. Say you wanted to help the locals so you got the power of a chef Sanitation Officer. What could you do to significantly clean up Roman Sanitation?

My kneejerk question (which I wanted to ask the other night when I met a bloke who's studying to be a urologist) would be "why would you want to do that?"

I can understand the need for such things. But how would you convince Romans of things that we would know regarding sanitation but they wouldn't?

That aside, wasn't Rome pretty efficient with it's sanitation? (or am I thinking of Mycenaeic Greece or post-Great Wall dynasty China) Sorry, ancient history isn't my forte., but this is an interesting topic esp since its seldom discussed
 
My kneejerk question (which I wanted to ask the other night when I met a bloke who's studying to be a urologist) would be "why would you want to do that?"

A person in that situation may prefer the wine, women and song rather than the work of cleaning up Rome.


I can understand the need for such things. But how would you convince Romans of things that we would know regarding sanitation but they wouldn't?

That aside, wasn't Rome pretty efficient with it's sanitation? (or am I thinking of Mycenaeic Greece or post-Great Wall dynasty China) Sorry, ancient history isn't my forte., but this is an interesting topic esp since its seldom discussed

It is not going to be an easy task. Just collecting the biological waste in the city every week, would be a huge task particularly using animals that make more poo.
 
The Romans were certainly better than most in terms of sanitation. They had functioning sewers, public baths, fresh water thanks to the aqueducts, the rich often had internal plumbing! (You can see it in Pompeii!) They could probably use a regular trash service, though they likely didn't produce quite so much garbage as we do today. I guess the most good I could probably do would be to spread more of those advances they already had to more than just the major urban centers and to smaller rural settlements.

Another idea would be to perhaps improve knowledge of some basic stuff such as hand washing and some very basic dental care type stuff that weren't really covered by the commonly held miasma theory of disease at the time.
 
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