CHOLERA

See Also: DISEASES; SEWAGE Toshers; MENU

In 1831 London suffered its first outbreak of cholera. It took over a decade for the connection to begin to be made between London's water supply, the city s drains, and the state of its London's public health. Initially, contemporary medical wisdom believed that cholera was carried in an invisible cloud floating in the air.

Cholera was a disease that acquired an overtone of class conflict. Its sufferers were overwhelmingly working-class. Those middle-class people who spent time in the slums that it infected only rarely contracted it. This was because they tended not to eat or drink while in such districts and for the most part did not enter the overcrowded housing.

Joshua Brookes

Joshua Brookes (1761-1833) was a leading anatomist of his era. He wrote on good sanitation and cholera. He was renowned for being dirty.

John Snow

John Snow came from a humble family in York. He grew up in poor, insanitary housing. He became an apprentice at the age of fourteen. As a young man he had been involved in containing an outbreak in Newcastle.

He came to London and attended the Hunterian medical school, where arsenic was used in embalming fluid. Therefore, his fellow pupils were passing out during dissection. From his campaigning, the element was no longer used in the fluid or candles, which the element could make burn more brightly.¹

In 1845 an outbreak ravaged the population of Soho. Dr John Snow mapped out the incidences of the disease. He noted that only a handful of people out of several hundred people in the local workhouse had died; it has its own well. Snow appreciated that none of the 70-strong workforce of the Huggins brewery had had cholera. They received a ration of malt liquor and did not drink water.²

The physician concluded that a water pump was the probable source of the eruption. Using his research, he was able to persuade the parish elders to remove the utensil's handle. The epidemic subsided. Snow's methodology, which was carried out without a knowledge of the existence of the cholera bacteria, helped to give birth to epidemiology.

There was resistance to his thinking as being too simple. Snow died before the rigour of his work was acknowledged by the Board of Health.

¹. Dr Snow's initial distinction lay in his being the first British physician to study anaesthesia in a scientific manner (which has a degree of irony in it, in view of his arguing that cholera was not carried by invisible clouds). In 1853 Snow administered chloroform to Queen Victoria during the birth of Prince Leopold.

². Snow himself was a teetotaller.

Location: The John Snow, 39 Broadwick Street, W1F 9QJ. Snow was a teetotaller. (blue, orange)

50 Broadwick Street, WC1N 1PB. The site of Huggins & Company. (purple, brown)

54 Frith Street, W1D 3HZ. Dr Snow's home. (red, purple)

See Also: SLUMS & AVENUES; SOHO Cholera

The John Snow Society

Website: https://johnsociety.org

Water Supply

There was a district of South London that was served by both the Southwark & Vauxhall Water Company, which drew its water from the Thames locally, and the Lambeth Waterworks Company, which in 1852 moved its supply upriver to where the river was much less polluted. The former's customers suffered from cholera the latter's did not.

See Also: WATER SUPPLY

David Backhouse 2024