This chapter imagines an ordinary day in the life of a female monastic community in twelfth-century Germany. The chapter, like the monastic day, is organized around the celebration of the monastic liturgy of the hours. Between the liturgical hours in the oratory, the nuns attend to their daily business in the cloister, chapter house, lavatory, refectory, and workshops. The flow and activities of this monastic day are based primarily on the Rule of St. Benedict, the customary of Hirsau, and Hildegard of Bingen’s own commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict, as well as on archaeological and bioarchaeological evidence that reflects medieval monastic lifeways.

The chapter provides a broader comparative view of the League’s environmental concerns. The main aim of the discussion in this chapter it to weave these different initiatives (which are described separately in each chapter) into a coherent and broad regime, ones that has a common ground, continuity, and certain dynamics. As each chapter explains the role played by central theories, ideas, conflicting interests, environmental challenges, and scientific or professional concerns, this chapter puts them together and explain some of the differences and common patterns. Moreover, this analysis also revises the League’s different endeavors from contemporary environmental perspectives, and assesses their relevance to current dilemmas where nature protection conflicts with human needs.

Each of the chapters explores a different dimension of the League’s environmental policy. They focus on the environmental impacts of pollution of the sea by oil, the growing whaling industry and endangered whales, rural hygiene and sanitation problems in the periphery, and timber production and fears of spreading deforestation. There may well be other interwar concerns that also involved environmental perspectives. However, I present a sweeping legal-historical overview of several of the central environmental challenges that the interwar world faced, in order to understand the notions behind the League’s leadership and to explain its shortcomings and achievements.

The chapter explores the League’s “rural hygiene” campaign. During its work on different reflections of sanitary problems that put local, national, and global public health at risk, the League invested substantial scientific, comparative, and professional effort while it was considering possible policies with which these dangers could be faced. These suggested policies, articulated in terms of international law, focused on the eradication of a variety of environmental-sanitary risks and spreading diseases, which the League believed to be plaguing the countryside in Eastern Europe and across the “Far East”. Among the international community’s concerns were the need to protect water resources from human and nonhuman pollution, to treat refuse, to fight spreading diseases in rural areas, to limit fly breeding, to control rats and pests, and more. Citing these concerns as threats to local and international communities, the League conceptualized agricultural peripheries as a rural frontier from which humanity could better protect itself, using various means of sanitary engineering, special medical services, and political awareness.

This chapter tracks two main events that took up much of the League’s attention. First, it assembled the European Conference on Rural Hygiene (1931) and, later, parallel to its main agenda, the Intergovernmental Conference of Far Eastern Countries on Rural Hygiene, held at Bandoeng, Java in August 1937.

Chapter 4 discusses the evolution of the urban space of Jeddah in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century on the basis of maps, photographs, and documents. It shows the impact of the Ottoman modernisation efforts regarding the urban fabric. Thus, the economic lifelines of the city, such as the ports and markets, were regularly cleaned and expanded. New buildings also reflected the increase of the state functions of administration and health. The latter issue was given particular attention in the light of concerns over epidemics, most notably cholera. Another major and related concern was the provision of sufficient and clean drinking water. Urban growth is also seen in the evolution and growth of suburbs which were closely linked to the city.

Chapter six investigates the economic bases of Jeddah, trade and pilgrimage. A brief overview of major trends in trade and transport is followed by a more detailed discussion of the merchants of Jeddah and their internal organisation. The political role of the merchants and their relation to the respective ruling powers forms another topic. The chapter then turns to the pilgrimage, starting by investigating the pilgrims’ guides and the way in which they organised reception, accommodation and transport for pilgrims. Given the attempts of Western powers to limit what were perceived health and political threats emanating from the pilgrimage, the ways in which such organisation played out locally through the consulates is touched upon, notably in as far it affected local water and health provision. Finally, the chapter turns to the Bedouin, a population usually residing outside of the city walls but indispensable to trade and pilgrimage and constituting a vital link between the city, its suburbs and surroundings.

This chapter delineates the long-term factors that predisposed Harare’s townships to a diarrhoeal disease outbreak and the short-term factors that precipitated the 2008–09 cholera epidemic. Foundational to my argument is the claim that urban order in the city has always been bound up with strategies of political control and social inequality. Under colonial rule, historically produced segregation and social inequality laid down the underlying physical conditions in the high-density townships – namely poor sanitation facilities, inadequate clean water provision and overcrowded housing – for the potential spread of an epidemic in the high-density areas of the city. These conditions can be traced as far back as the late nineteenth century when Harare was founded as an administrative centre for the white settler regime. They have persisted through the twentieth century and were never adequately rectified by the post-colonial government despite its ostensible attempts to transform urban spaces in the 1980s and 1990s. Finally, the chapter examines how the post-2000 political and economic meltdown triggered an urban crisis that ultimately precipitated the cholera outbreak.

According to the World Heath Organization's (WHO) EMT initiative, teams must meet an agreed set of standards, both clinically and logistically. EMTs must be self-sustainable and not create a burden on the already stretched resources of a host nation.

The technical demands of field hospitals require logistical personnel with specialist skills, which ensures a field hospital can continue to function when all around them has been destroyed. They must be multiskilled to fulfill multiple roles within the team.

A collection of tents does not constitute a field hospital: methodical planning around safety and security, patient flow, and overall functionality is a necessity. Field hospitals require large volumes of clean water that meets or exceeds the WHO standards of potable water; consequently, EMTs must understand the requirements of self sustainability, water quality, and quantities for the delivery of services they are offering. WASH requires an expertise and the capacity and capability to deliver high levels of WASH irrespective of the circumstances. Leading by example in health care to other health-care personnel and facilities is a essential criteria of an EMT: technical logistics is key to achieving this.

The seventh chapter, “An Era of Optimism,” analyzes the new culture of sanitation practices that helped to define modernity. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, those living in the developed world became accustomed to wearing shoes, using toilet paper, bathing regularly with soap, and utilizing refrigeration systems to extend the life of foods. In the mid-twentieth century, populations in the Global North benefited from population-wide vaccination programs against poliomyelitis, the prevalence of which seemed to have increased as a result of the implementation of better sanitation systems. Based on the "hygiene hypothesis," many specialists believed that poliomyelitis was rare in regions without modern sanitation. This was not the case. Regrettably, polio vaccination did not begin in the developing world until the 1970s. Oral rehydration therapy, a major breakthrough in the treatment of diarrheal disease, saved millions of lives.

The conclusion summarizes the major themes and findings of the book. The first major advance in the control of infectious intestinal disease in the modern era was in the treatment of water supplies. In the first half of the twentieth century, the combined package of underground sewerage and purified water won broad cultural acceptance. Modern sanitation conveyed enormous population-level benefits, even as it produced some unanticipated vulnerabilities and contrary health outcomes. Oral rehydration therapy and childhood immunizations have dramatically improved childhood survival rates, contributing to soaring population growth and deepening environmental challenges.

The second chapter, “Early Change,” explores what is known about environments in which intestinal disease transmission emerged. It marshals research in the biological sciences to discuss the settings in which early communities were able to transmit some intestinal pathogens and parasites, long before the agricultural revolution. It suggests that the construct of the “first epidemiological transition” needs to be revised. It explores the patterns of vulnerability to infectious intestinal disease associated with hunting, gathering, and fishing in an early era and those associated with early farming practices, settlements, and pastoral nomadism. It provides a historical overview of the evolution of zones of infectious intestinal disease, the various Eurasian attitudes toward human waste, regional patterns in the use or non-use of human excreta in early agriculture, and early urban sanitation.