The Butchering Art by Lindsey Fitzharris

Author:Lindsey Fitzharris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

8.

THEY’RE ALL DEAD

No Scientific subject can be so important to Man as that of his own life. No knowledge can be so incessantly appealed to by the incidents of every day, as the knowledge of the processes by which he lives and acts.

—GEORGE HENRY LEWES

UPON INQUIRING AFTER THE WELFARE of one of his patients, a surgeon at Guy’s Hospital in London was informed by his assistant that the man in question had died. The surgeon, who had become inured to this kind of news, replied, “Oh, very well!” He moved on to the next ward to ask about another patient. Again, the answer came, “Dead, sir.” The surgeon paused a moment. Frustrated, he cried, “Why, they’re not all dead?” To this, his assistant responded, “Yes, sir, they are.”

Scenes like this were playing out all over Britain. Mortality rates within hospitals had reached an all-time high by the 1860s. Efforts to clean up the wards had made little impact on incidences of hospitalism. What’s more, in the past several years there had been growing disagreement within the medical community over prevailing disease theories.

Cholera, in particular, had become increasingly difficult to explain within a miasmic paradigm. There had already been three major outbreaks in recent decades that had claimed the lives of nearly 100,000 people in England and Wales alone. The disease was running rampant throughout Europe, creating in its wake a medical, political, and humanitarian crisis that could not be ignored. Although non-contagionists could point to the fact that outbreaks often occurred in filthy urban areas, they could not explain why cholera had followed lines of human communication as it spread from the Indian subcontinent, nor could they resolve why some outbreaks occurred during the winter when bad smells were minimal.

Back in the late 1840s, a physician from Bristol named William Budd argued that the disease was spread by contaminated sewage carrying “a living organism of a distinct species, which was taken by the act of swallowing it, which multiplied in the intestine by self propagation.” In an article published in the British Medical Journal, Budd wrote that “there was no proof whatever” that “the poisons of specific contagious diseases ever originate spontaneously” or were transmitted through the air via miasma. During the latter outbreak, he prioritized disinfecting measures with an antiseptic, advising, “All discharges from the sick men to be received, on their issue from the body, if possible, into vessels containing a solution of chloride of zinc.”

Budd wasn’t the only one to question the spontaneous origin and aerial transmission of cholera’s spread. The surgeon John Snow also began investigating the matter when a deadly outbreak occurred near his house in Soho, London, in 1854. Snow started plotting cases on a map, and that was when he noticed that a majority of people who fell ill were receiving their water from a pump on the southwest corner of the intersection of Broad (now Broadwick) Street and Cambridge (now Lexington) Street. Even cases that were at first glance unconnected with the

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