John Snow (no, not the Game of Thrones guy) and the Reverend Henry Whitehead. The one on Broad Street was particularly bad and would take over 600 lives. Since no one knew about germs or how cholera infected people, it meant that many water pumps were contaminated. Why? Basically, because no one understood sanitation, people’s waste was going into the Thames. In 1854, a major outbreak of cholera occurred in London. This story is really straight forward but takes into account a lot of the confusion when trying to treat diseases before the idea of a germ was totally understood. Eventually, the cholera would run its course and the infected person would not succumb to malnutrition of other effects. If only people knew the best solution was to keep eating and drinking excessively.

Cholera causes you to go to the bathroom an excessive amount of times. This wouldn’t be known back when this happened but one of the best treatments for cholera is somewhat ironic. The cholera outbreak chronicled here killed 616 people. The story of the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak in England and how two men figured out why it was happening. If you thought doctors were clueless now….

The reason the cholera body count hadn’t grown exponentially was that only the Lewis family could access the cesspool-therefore, baby Lewis’s waste was the only source of cholera in the well, and the cholera agent wasn’t growing exponentially.Brendan’s Alternate Tagline for The Ghost Map: Whitehead realized that the surveyor had answered his objections to Snow’s theory.

Earlier investigations had missed the cesspool connection, perhaps because they were too focused on miasma. He commissioned surveyors to examine the cesspool, and the surveyor found that it had, indeed, leaked into the well. Whitehead realized that the baby’s cholera evacuations must have been deposited near the Broad Street well. Whitehead interviewed Sarah Lewis and learned that she’d thrown soiled diapers into a cesspool. While studying the data, he came across the medical report for baby Lewis, who’d experienced diarrhea before dying. He began searching for an “index case”-i.e., the earliest cholera victim of 1854. As the data about the cholera outbreak continued to pile up, Whitehead began to believe Snow’s theory.

Ghost Map by Steven Johnson