According to historian Ida Jager, many Amsterdammers lived under appalling circumstances, "particularly in the Jordaan neighbourhood, but also in the Jewish quarter and on the islands in the northern part of town. There, people who lived in the basements would step in the groundwater when they got out of their beds in the morning.
"People had no toilets. They used buckets, which they emptied in the gutters and the canals. Until the beginning of the 1870s many people died from cholera. Sometimes people who were not dead yet were taken out of their houses in a coffin to the cemetery to die, to prevent them from infecting the other members of the family."
As a doctor of both medicine and chemistry, Sarphati knew that health and hygiene went hand in hand. He understood that the city's biggest problem had to be tackled first, in order to improve the general well-being of Amsterdam's poor population.
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...van der Kooy describes how Sarphati, with his PhD in chemistry, found a way of processing these ashes into fertiliser and then transported them to the east of the country where peat was being cultivated. Not only the ashes could be used, there was also the human manure and the dirt that was swept off the streets. All that was being processed and used as fertiliser.
Organising Amsterdam's rubbish collection is only one of the projects Sarphati was involved in at the time. He strongly believed that education was the people's ticket out of poverty and, in the mid 1840s, he founded a new type of school for trade and industry. Another one of his projects was the setting-up of a bread factory, where cheap and good quality bread could be produced in large quantities.
Van der Kooy says that not all of Sarphati's plans were greeted with a lot of enthusiasm by the local government. "Sarphati's plans were very expensive. At the time the ruling classes did not believe in government involvement in enterprises that could be done by private persons...
Bertine Krol Radio Netherlands 14 May 2003
