At Home - Bill Bryson [195]
Other diseases actually wrecked more lives. Those who survived cholera generally recovered completely, unlike scarlet fever victims (who were often left deaf or brain-damaged) or smallpox sufferers (who could be horribly disfigured). Yet it was cholera that became a national obsession. Between 1845 and 1856, over seven hundred books on cholera were published in English. What particularly troubled people was that they didn’t know what caused it or how to escape it. “What is cholera?” The Lancet wrote in 1853. “Is it a fungus, an insect, a miasma, an electrical disturbance, a deficiency of ozone, a morbid off-scouring of the intestinal canal? We know nothing.”
The most common belief was that cholera and other terrible diseases arose from impure air. Anything that was wasted or foul—sewage, corpses in graveyards, decomposing vegetation, human exhalations—was thought to be disease-producing and potentially lethal. “Malarious aromata rampage invisible through every street,” wrote one chronicler, a touch colorfully, at midcentury. “Atmospheric poison and pungent factor and gaseous filth cry aloud and spare not, and the wayfaring man inhales at every breath a pair of lungs full of vaporized decomposing gutter mud and rottenness.” Liverpool’s chief medical officer in 1844 calculated with confident precision the actual extent of the damage, reporting to Parliament: “By the mere action of the lungs of the inhabitants of Liverpool a stratum of air sufficient to cover the entire surface of the town to a depth of three feet is daily rendered unfit for the purposes of respiration.”
The most devoted and influential believer in miasma theory was Edwin Chadwick, a secretary of the Poor Law Commission and author of A Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, which became a somewhat improbable best seller in 1842. Chadwick’s fundamental belief was that if you got rid of smells, you got rid of disease. “All smell is disease,” he explained to a parliamentary inquiry. His wish was to clean up poor neighborhoods and the habitations within them, not to make conditions more agreeable for the inhabitants, but simply to get rid of the smells.
Chadwick was an intense and cheerless figure, much given to petty jealousies and arguments over position. A lawyer by training, he spent most of his life working on various royal commissions: on making improvements to the poor laws; on conditions in factories; on levels of sanitation in cities; on preventing avoidable deaths; on reorganizing the registration of births, deaths, and marriages. Almost no one liked him. His work on the poor law of 1834, which introduced a national system of workhouses that were almost penal in their nature, made him widely despised among working people—“the most unpopular single individual in the whole United Kingdom,” according to one biographer. Even his family seems not to have had any great affection for him. Chadwick’s mother had died when he was small, and his father remarried and started a second family in the west of England. Eventually, this second family emigrated to Brooklyn and relations between the American branch and Edwin Chadwick appear to have ceased.
One of the children of the second marriage was Henry Chadwick, whose career path went in a different direction altogether. He became a sportswriter and an energetic early promoter of organized baseball. Indeed, Henry Chadwick is sometimes described as the father of the modern game. He devised the scorecard, box score, batting average, earned run average, and many of the other statistical