I've never heard the idea that no one during the Middle Ages drank water, so I'm not sure who the author is referring to when they say reputable scholars repeat

I've never heard the idea that no one during the Middle Ages drank water, so I'm not sure who the author is referring to when they say reputable scholars repeat this idea unthinkingly. It is notable that there seem to be no references in the post to anyone who actually believes this supposed myth. The notion that anyone believed "bad water" caused disease is also one I've never heard in a Medieval context. "Bad air" and evil supernatural influences were the most commonly believed causes of disease in Medieval Europe. People may have drunk watered wine and small beer and said they believed it "healthful", but many people smoked cigarette in early-to-mid 20th century said that was "healthful" too. Some of them may have even believed it. What people say about things doesn't necessarily tell us much about their actual reasons for doing them, or their true effect. Drinking your local water source, full of micro-organisms your body was already familiar with, may have been on average no worse for you than drinking watered wine or small beer. Or there may have been some raw empiricism at work whereby people noticed that people who rarely drank pure water didn't get sick when everyone else did. To make that argument you'd have to give an account of why no one ever noticed that bloodletting never cured anyone of anything, or that geese didn't actually come from barnacles, and so on. Our ancestors were very bright, but had an outlook on the world that allowed them to miss the notion that small animals--tinier than dust motes in a beam of sunshine, too small for the eye to see--that lived in water and on decaying flesh and feces were the cause of much disease. Which is weird, because you'd think that such a simple idea would have been mentioned by god in one of those books he spent so much time dictating or inspiring: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1052 http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1052