Soho! A Fox!

It's amazing how you can walk past something on a regular basis, see it, register it and not realise that behind it, there's a story, a little part of history that makes you look at it with fresh new eyes. London is the type of city that's littered with such phenomena so I thought I'd take a short moment to point one out.

Walking around Soho, looking for a place to eat, I often pass an old, disabled water pump at the corner of Broadwick and Lexington Street. It's a memorial to John Snow, a 19th century physician whose study of the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak led to revolutionary new thinking on how such outbreaks are handled.

Back in the 19th century, the popular theories all suggested things like cholera and the black death were all caused and spread by 'bad air', this has a very viral, airborne feel to it. It turns out (a fact we now take for granted) that these things are bacterial and can only spread by physical contact or ingesting but it would be years before the world accepted it.

Cast your mind back to August 1854, a major cholera epidemic hit Soho and at this point in Snow's life he had done a fair bit of research into the ways cholera spread so naturally he headed out to investigate. Speaking to a number of local residents, he discovered they all used a common water pump on Broad Street. He then went on to publish a map with the homes of the infected plotted on it (if you're familiar with Soho, you will notice how things have changed since). He used that map to convince the local authorities to remove the handle from the pump and, hey presto, the epidemic died down. No water, no disease.

Looking at the map, it seems hard to deny the incidents are clumped around the pump but shortly after the epidemic, the authorities put the handle back on the pump because to leave it off would be accepting that cholera came from an infected water supply and go against the 'bad air' doctrine at the time.

Convincing people to go against doctrine is a problem that lasts to this day. For any public health reforms, you still have to mount a political struggle but this probably says more about politics then it does about public health (at least we don't dig wells too close to cesspits anymore).

Next time you find yourself here, spare a thought not just to Dr. John Snow but also to the countless landmarks and buildings around the city that all have a story to tell.