Sarah Lewis
Sarah is a young mother with a very ill infant whose soiled diapers she disposes of by tossing them into a cesspool in the front of her house. This act becomes the epicenter of the cholera outbreak in Soho in August 1854.
John Snow
John Snow was already a renowned and respected London anesthesiologist who had been studying the transmission of cholera for several years when the 1854 outbreak occurred. Armed with the research material he’d already collected, he was convinced that the disease was transmitted by contagion: pass from one person to another. This idea stood in direct opposition to the prevailing thinking of the time.
Henry Whitehead
Henry Whitehead was a popular priest well known among the residents of Soho who took an active interest in studying the link between cause and effect in the spread of cholera. Whitehead begins as a fervent supporter of that prevailing thought: miasma, in which the effect of the cholera epidemic was caused by contact with contaminated air. Although an opponent to Snow’s contagion theory for most of the story, by the end he has followed the evidence to become a true believer in Snow’s ideas.
Edwin Chadwick
Chadwick founded and headed up the General Board of Health, making him one of the most influential men in the country on the subject of science and health. Chadwick was even more convinced of the irrefutability of the miasma theory and this misguided misunderstanding resulted in his power to advise and implement policies which actually contributed to the spread of an unknown number of contagious diseases leading to potentially thousands of deaths. Even after Whitehead’s conversion and the presentation of Snow’s evidence, Chadwick not only refused to acknowledge contagious spread of disease, but publicly denounce the very concept as illogical.
