Share Coming down with an infectious disease in early 1900s London would have been a pretty unsettling experience. Not only were effective treatments hard to come by, but the municipality had the legal right to enter your home and disinfect it. City workers could seize your belongings and take them away for steam cleaning, all in the name of public health. Yet these precautions were not draconian or even heartless: If this process rendered you homeless, you would be offered overnight accommodation in a comfortable, modern one-bedroom apartment alongside the building where your possessions wer...