At Home - Bill Bryson [197]
Snow announced his findings in a pamphlet of 1849, On the Mode of Communication of Cholera, which demonstrated a clear link between cholera and water contaminated with human feces. It is one of the most important documents in the history of statistics, public health, medicine, demographics, forensic science—one of the most important documents, in short, of the nineteenth century. No one listened, and the epidemics kept coming.
In 1854, a particularly virulent outbreak hit Soho. In a single small neighborhood around Broad Street, more than five hundred people died in ten days, making it, as Snow noted, probably the most devastating occurrence of sudden mortality in history, worse even than the great plague. The toll would have been much higher except that so many people fled the district.
The patterns of deaths presented some puzzling anomalies. One of the victims died in Hampstead and another in Islington—both miles away. Snow hiked out to where the outlying victims lived and interviewed relatives and neighbors. It turned out that the Hampstead victim was a fan of Broad Street water—she liked it so much that she had it delivered regularly to her house—and had taken a draft shortly before becoming ill. The Islington victim was her niece, who had come to visit and had drunk some water, too.
Snow managed to persuade the parish council to remove the handle from a water pump on Broad Street, after which cholera deaths in the neighborhood vanished—or so it is commonly reported. In fact, the epidemic was already subsiding by the time the handle was removed, largely because so many people had fled, thinking the very air was poisonous.
Despite the accumulated evidence, Snow’s conclusions were still rejected. When Snow appeared before a parliamentary select committee, the chairman, Sir Benjamin Hall, found it impossible to credit his findings. In a dumbfounded tone, Hall asked Snow: “Are the Committee to understand, taking the case of bone-boilers, that no matter how offensive to the sense of smell of effluvia that comes from the bone-boiling establishments may be, yet you consider that it is not prejudicial in any way to the health of the inhabitants of the district?”
“That is my opinion,” replied Snow, but unfortunately his manner, always diffident, was less forthright than his conclusions, and authorities continued to reject them.
It is hard now to appreciate just how controversial and unwelcome Snow’s views were. Many authorities actively detested him for them. The Lancet concluded that he was in the pocket of business interests which wished to continue to fill the air with “pestilent vapors, miasms and loathsome abominations of every kind,” and make themselves rich by poisoning their neighbors. “After careful enquiry,” the parliamentary inquiry concluded, “we see no reason to adopt this belief.”
Finally, the inevitable happened. In the summer of 1858, London suffered a heat wave combined with a drought in which waste accumulated but didn’t get washed away. Temperatures soared into the nineties and stayed there—an unusual condition for London. The result was “the Great Stink,” as the Times dubbed it. The Thames grew so noxious that almost no one could bear to be near it. “Whoso once inhales the stink can never forget it,” wrote one newspaper. The drapes of the new Houses of Parliament were drawn tight and doused in a solution of chloride of lime to mitigate the lethal smells, but the result was something like panic. Parliament had to be suspended. Some members, according to Stephen Halliday in The Great Stink of London, tried to venture into the library, overlooking the river, “but they were instantaneously driven to retreat, each man with a handkerchief to his nose.”
Snow never got to see this or any of his ideas vindicated. He died suddenly of a stroke in the midst of the Great Stink, not knowing that one day he would be considered a hero.