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(15 March 1813 – 16 June 1858)
In the summer of 1854 a cholera epidemic centred around Broad Street London’s Soho district (now Broadwick Street) killied over 500 people in just one week.
Dr John Snow, who lived in the area at the time had a theory about the disease being water borne, not carried in the miasma, as was the current thinking.
With the help of the Reverend Henry Whitehead, John Snow mapped the local area marking the death toll on what is to become the Ghost Map.
The map clearly shows a concentration of the deaths in the area around the local water pump, now situated outside the John Snow pub.
He then petitioned the local council, with the help of Queen Victoria, to have the pump handle taken off the Broad Street waterpump.
John Snow was the Queen’s anaesthetist, giving her chloroform during two of her pregnancies. John Snow was a leader in the development of anaesthesia.
He then re mapped the area and found the disease was no longer concentrated on this pump.
It was later discovered that the source of the water for the Broad Street pump had been dung just a few feet from a cesspit and a nappy from an cholera infected baby had got into the water.
This was one of the first uses of epidemiology in the world, the statistical analysis of the spread of a disease.
Unfortunately the medical profession didn’t taken John Snow’s ideas until after his death, at the untimely age of 45.
It wasn’t until the Great Stink of 1858 that parliament started to take the problem of sewage seriously then engaging the work of the engineer Joseph Bazalgettet to build a sewage system for the city.
In the meantime why not checkout Steven Johnson’s excellent book The Ghost Map available at Amazon.
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Here’s a short list of the job titles on offer in 1850’s London. You might not want to read about them while having you lunch. Here’s some more
bone-pickers
rag-gatherers
pure-finders
dredgermen
mud-larks
sewer-hunters
dustmen
night-soil men
bunters
toshers
shoremen
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