The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Johnson Steven

Author:Johnson, Steven [Johnson, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Riverhead
Published: 2006-10-18T16:00:00+00:00

BY THE END OF THE DAY, SNOW HAD BUILT A CONVINCING statistical case against the pump. Of the eighty-three deaths recorded on Farr’s list, seventy-three were in houses that were closer to the Broad Street pump than to any other public water source. Of those seventy-three, Snow had learned, sixty-one were habitual drinkers of Broad Street water. Only six of the dead were definitively not Broad Street drinkers. The final six remained mysteries, “owing to the death or departure of every one connected with the deceased individuals,” as Snow would later write. The ten cases that fell outside the imagined boundary line surrounding the Broad Street pump were equally telling: eight appeared to have a connection to Broad Street. Snow had established new causal chains back to the pump water, beyond the list of Farr’s addresses: the proprietor of the coffeehouse who often sold sherbet mixed with Broad Street water told Snow that nine of her customers had died since the outbreak began. He had drawn the telling contrast between the Lion Brewery and the Eley Brothers factory; he had documented the unlikely safe haven of the Poland Street Workhouse. He even had his experimentum crucis in Hampstead.

It was, on the face of it, a staggering display of investigative work, given the manic condition of the neighborhood itself. In the twenty-four hours since he’d received Farr’s early numbers, Snow had tracked down intimate details of behavior from the surviving family and neighbors of more than seventy people. The fearlessness of the act still astonishes: as the neighborhood emptied in terror from the most savage outbreak in the city’s history, Snow spent hour after hour visiting the houses that had suffered the worst—houses that were, in fact, still under assault. His friend and biographer Benjamin Ward Richardson later recalled: “No one but those who knew him intimately can conceive how he laboured, at what cost, and at what risk. Wherever cholera was visitant, there was he in the midst.”

It’s unlikely that anyone in London that day had a better sense of the outbreak’s magnitude than John Snow and Henry Whitehead. But ironically, their local knowledge of Broad Street made it hard for them to gauge the true extent of the tragedy. There were at least twice as many Soho residents suffering in a local hospital as there were people dying in the shuttered dark of their own homes. In the three days after September 1, more than 120 cholera patients overwhelmed the staff at nearby Middlesex Hospital, where Florence Nightingale observed that a disproportionate number of the sufferers appeared to be prostitutes. The sick were stacked together in large, open rooms, and treated with saline and calomel. The air was thick with the smell of chlorine and sulfuric acid that the staff had scattered around the sickrooms in large dishes, ostensibly to purify the air. It was ultimately of little use: two-thirds of the patients died.

When the number became too great to house at Middlesex, new arrivals were sent to the University College Hospital.

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