John Snow isn’t just a famous character from HBO’s “Game of Thrones.” He was a real person, an MD in fact, living in London, England in the mid-1850s. And we all owe him a good deal of gratitude, because without him, there’s no telling how many more of our ancestors would have succumbed to cholera.
In 1854, an outbreak of cholera hit the neighborhood streets of London. The running theory of the day was that miasma, meaning bad air, was the source of these outbreaks. John Snow worked to refute this idea. He believed contaminated water was to blame. He proceeded to map out the infected individuals and proposed a hypothesis that the public water pump on Broad Street was the commonality.
John Snow Water Pump, Source: CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=357998
I had plans to visit the pump on my recent trip to London, pictured above, which features a plaque in dedication to Snow. Unfortunately jet lag got the best of me and instead, I stayed in a nice comfy bed in the Grosvenor Hotel (tangent: it was the first hotel in Europe with an operating lift – aka an elevator, for us Americans).
Thankfully, the local authorities heeded Snow’s warning and removed the pump’s handle, so locals could no longer drink from it. Miraculously, the outbreak came to an end! Yet, surprisingly, his germ theory was rejected by scientists of his time, and outbreaks in England (and America) continued on for decades. That’s right, decades.
It took nearly 30 years for another physician, Robert Koch in 1883, to substantiate Snow’s findings by isolating the bacteria that caused the disease. He determined ingestion of unsanitary water spurred the outbreaks. Eventually, new public sanitation measures were put in place that saved countless numbers of citizens, including ourselves, from the horror that is cholera.
Unfortunately, the World Health Organization is still reporting an estimated 21 to 143 thousand deaths worldwide due to cholera today. Let’s stop for a moment and think about that. Think about the generations to come who will be researching our contemporaries in their family trees and discovering these terrible realizations.
Have you found someone in your tree that met an untimely death due to cholera? Or do you have a personal connection to Dr. John Snow? If so, let me know in the comments!
Sources:
https://www.who.int/health-topics/cholera#tab=overview
http://thispodcastwillkillyou.com/2018/02/10/episode-4-the-st-show/
https://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow/broadstreetpump.html
https://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow/snowcricketarticle.html
https://www.pastmedicalhistory.co.uk/john-snow-and-the-1854-cholera-outbreak/
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Broad-Street-pump-cholera-outbreak-of-1854
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