In the rare moments when her little girl caught a few minutes of sleep, Sarah Lewis crept down to the cellar at 40 Broad and tossed the fouled water in the cesspool that lay at the front of the house.
That is how it began.
The “it” which begins here in this cesspool in front of the house at 40 Broad is the 1854 cholera epidemic of London. Specifically, the Soho neighborhood. And that street—Broad Street—is not just some dirty diapers were thrown, it is also where a water pump is located. That water pump is going to feature prominently in the story; actually, it will be of greater prominence than Sarah Lewis or her poor sick little baby. The water coming out of that pump carries no foul odors and is therefore considered “clean.” The scientific wisdom of the time was in general agreement that illness which affected more than one person at a time had nothing to do with water and everything to do with noxious odors in the air. If the air smell good, everything was good to go. The problem is that the water coming out of that pump was not as clean as it smelled. An even bigger problem, of course, was the smell had nothing to do with the transference of cholera.
Remarkably, in all the discussion of cholera that had percolated through the popular and scientific press since the disease had arrived on British soil in 1832, almost no one suggested that the disease might be transmitted by means of contaminated water.
The miasma theory had taken hold of the scientific community and filtered on down and so it was just taken for granted that cholera “somehow lingered in the `miasma’ of unsanitary spaces.” The very idea that disease could passed through water somehow didn’t register. This does seem really and truly remarkable—beyond remarkable, it seems downright unbelievable. If the sickness could just sort of hang around in the noxious air waiting to attack randomly, why could it not travel through water. Whatever the irrational obstruction, this was the case at the time. And this is why the people pushing the idea of contagion through the water supply faced such an uphill battle that it would be another dozen years after hard evidence proving the contagion claim was the actual answer before it would become the basis for an official government policy of disease prevention.
“After careful inquiry, we see no reason to adopt this belief.”
The heads of the Board of Health were committed believers in the miasma theory. Despite the evidence which included the correlation between never drinking water from that pump on Broad Street and not being afflicted by the cholera outbreak, the Board summarily dismissed the findings offered in the extensive research conducted by Dr. John Snow. The author explains that his decision to completely dismiss even the possibility that contagion through water in favor of the unproven belief in the fundamentally unscientific explanation of miasma was not due to the members of the Board of Health being ignorant, political hacks or pushing a commercial agenda. It was due instead to something still horrifically present in society easily capable of committing an equitable folly on the same large scale today: “They were…blinded by an idea.”
