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Authors: Declan McHugh
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intersects with Poland Street; the pump model (it’s not the original) is right on that corner, with a silver plaque.
SHERLOCK OF THE SEWERS
Cholera is a disease that we regard as exotic these days; we tend to think of countries like India when we hear the word. However, in mid-nineteenth century London it was a very real threat – in 1849 in England 53,000 people died from the disease.
Cholera symptoms were extremely distressing: weakness, sweating, then involuntary urination and defecation over and over again leaving the victim with a raging thirst but also unable to keep anything down. The victim shrivelled up, the skin became grey and death-like while the face coloration became dark blue and sometimes almost black. Then came coma leading to death that was a relief for many. Two-thirds of those who contracted the disease died from it.
This story concerns the worst outbreak ever in Britain’s history. In 1854 a cholera epidemic struck London’s Soho district – an area where these days the worst you might feel is a little bit of indigestion after a night out.
Soho had once been a well-to-do area and Broad Street’s houses had been sought after in the mid-eighteenth century. One hundred years later, however, it was a poor area and that meant the inevitable overcrowding.
The cholera attack began on 28 August 1854 and in the course of the next two weeks around 700 people died. There were only 49 houses in Broad Street (as today’s Broadwick Street was known at the time) and 37 of them experienced cholera deaths. Florence Nightingale was one of the medical staff brought into the area to help the overloaded local medical services.
At the time of this 1854 outbreak 42-year-old John Snow was merely a reserved but effective local doctor who lived just ten minutes away from Broad Street. He had had an interest in cholera for a number of years. At this time it was not known that cholera was waterborne, instead many influential people argued that it was somehow in the air in unhealthy districts (the ‘miasma’ theory), and could be inhaled, or they thought that it was somehow transmitted person to person like influenza. Those two incorrect ideas were in the ascendency.
After considerable and painstaking study Snow had decided, 5 years before the Soho outbreak, that something in the faeces of infected humans, probably dissolved in drinking water, was the route of transmission. We now know that something to be bacterium Vibrio cholerae although the actual bacillus was not identified until 1884 – 30 years after the outbreak.
Snow’s response to the outbreak was a mixture of brilliant detective work and dogged determination – and he effectively did it all on his own. His success was the equivalent of the work of a genius detective successfully stalking a rampant serial killer (which effectively cholera was).
Snow had already noticed that one of the two water companies supplying to south London had moved its base of operations and was supplying water from an area away from sewage pollution. He theorised that if the disease was waterborne then people being supplied water by this Lambeth Company ought to suffer less from cholera than people who lived in the areas supplied by the rival Southwark and Vauxhall Company. He obtained the addresses of people dying from cholera, looked at the postcodes and was able to show that the theory was correct.
When the 1854 outbreak occurred Snow visited all the local water-pumps, including the one on the corner of Broad Street and Cambridge Street, and took samples home but he could find nothing unusual about this particular sample from the Broad Street pump. He decided to try a different method, knocking on hundreds of doors in the district to ascertain if a) anyone in the house was ill and b) which water pump they used. He then plotted the deaths on a map. Putting himself on the front-line in this way was of course very dangerous to his health had the ‘influenza’ model been
SHERLOCK OF THE SEWERS
Cholera is a disease that we regard as exotic these days; we tend to think of countries like India when we hear the word. However, in mid-nineteenth century London it was a very real threat – in 1849 in England 53,000 people died from the disease.
Cholera symptoms were extremely distressing: weakness, sweating, then involuntary urination and defecation over and over again leaving the victim with a raging thirst but also unable to keep anything down. The victim shrivelled up, the skin became grey and death-like while the face coloration became dark blue and sometimes almost black. Then came coma leading to death that was a relief for many. Two-thirds of those who contracted the disease died from it.
This story concerns the worst outbreak ever in Britain’s history. In 1854 a cholera epidemic struck London’s Soho district – an area where these days the worst you might feel is a little bit of indigestion after a night out.
Soho had once been a well-to-do area and Broad Street’s houses had been sought after in the mid-eighteenth century. One hundred years later, however, it was a poor area and that meant the inevitable overcrowding.
The cholera attack began on 28 August 1854 and in the course of the next two weeks around 700 people died. There were only 49 houses in Broad Street (as today’s Broadwick Street was known at the time) and 37 of them experienced cholera deaths. Florence Nightingale was one of the medical staff brought into the area to help the overloaded local medical services.
At the time of this 1854 outbreak 42-year-old John Snow was merely a reserved but effective local doctor who lived just ten minutes away from Broad Street. He had had an interest in cholera for a number of years. At this time it was not known that cholera was waterborne, instead many influential people argued that it was somehow in the air in unhealthy districts (the ‘miasma’ theory), and could be inhaled, or they thought that it was somehow transmitted person to person like influenza. Those two incorrect ideas were in the ascendency.
After considerable and painstaking study Snow had decided, 5 years before the Soho outbreak, that something in the faeces of infected humans, probably dissolved in drinking water, was the route of transmission. We now know that something to be bacterium Vibrio cholerae although the actual bacillus was not identified until 1884 – 30 years after the outbreak.
Snow’s response to the outbreak was a mixture of brilliant detective work and dogged determination – and he effectively did it all on his own. His success was the equivalent of the work of a genius detective successfully stalking a rampant serial killer (which effectively cholera was).
Snow had already noticed that one of the two water companies supplying to south London had moved its base of operations and was supplying water from an area away from sewage pollution. He theorised that if the disease was waterborne then people being supplied water by this Lambeth Company ought to suffer less from cholera than people who lived in the areas supplied by the rival Southwark and Vauxhall Company. He obtained the addresses of people dying from cholera, looked at the postcodes and was able to show that the theory was correct.
When the 1854 outbreak occurred Snow visited all the local water-pumps, including the one on the corner of Broad Street and Cambridge Street, and took samples home but he could find nothing unusual about this particular sample from the Broad Street pump. He decided to try a different method, knocking on hundreds of doors in the district to ascertain if a) anyone in the house was ill and b) which water pump they used. He then plotted the deaths on a map. Putting himself on the front-line in this way was of course very dangerous to his health had the ‘influenza’ model been
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