My City Wellness Summer 2022

My Wellness

In the mid-1800s, cramped cities throughout that killed thousands. Doctors and scientists in those times weren’t very sure how the epidemics began or what event caused the ailment. e prevailing theory of the day focused on “miasma” or bad air (sometimes called “night air”) that was believed to emanate from rotting matter and infect the body of the unfortunate. e germ theory of disease was not yet imagined. In 1854, physician John Snow began to look at cholera in a new light and his observations led him to distrust the miasma theory. When a massive outbreak of cholera exploded in Soho, London, Snow traveled there to investigate. He interviewed as many of the infected and their family members as he could, asking them to recount their days leading up to the onset of symptoms. He then plotted the location of the sick on a city map and realized that the majority of the stories and locations of the infected were centered around a single water source – the Broad Street pump. Snow wrote “within 250 yards of the spot where Cambridge Street joins Broad Street there were upwards of 500 fatal attacks of cholera within 10 days. I suspected contamination of the water of the much frequented street-pump in Broad Street.” Cholera and John Snow e Beginnings of Epidemiology BY PETER HINTERMAN England su ered through repeated outbreaks of cholera (a bacterial disease of the small intestine)

ABOVE: THE NEW LOCATION OF THE PUMP HANDLE AFTER RENOVATIONS, NOW ON THE SAME STREET AS THE JOHN SNOW PUB. AUTHOR: JAMZZE / WIKIMEDIA.ORG LEFT: DR. JOHN SNOW (1813-1858), BRITISH PHYSICIAN.

sick, speci cally asking what the source of their drinking water was. Workers at a brewery near the pump were una ected and Snow found that this was because the facility had its own water supply from which the men drank, while another factory near the pump experienced multiple deaths due to cholera and sourced its water from the pump. Snow then studied water from the pump and noticed “strange white ecks” in it that he believed were the source of the epidemic. Con dent in his analysis, he convinced town o cials to remove the handle of the pump. A er doing so, the cholera epidemic trickled to a stop. Despite the evidence, many medical professionals discounted Snow’s theory of infected water (administrators stupidly re-installed the handle a er only a few weeks) and one -man, Reverend Henry Whitehead, set out to prove him wrong but his own investigation only con rmed Snow’s hypothesis. His meticulous work in tracing the spread of cholera and pinpointing the source as the Broad Street pump, earned Snow his place as one of the founders of modern epidemiology. (Epidemiology is the branch of medicine which deals with the incidence, distribution and possible control of diseases.) During his career, Snow made additional valuable contributions to Germ eory (during his study of cholera), pushed for fundamental changes in London’s waste system, and pioneered the use of anesthetics in surgery and childbirth. ®

In his data collection routine, Snow also interviewed those who had not become

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