John Snow, meanwhile, had made his way from a simple working-class existence to the cream of the crop of London’s medical world. He adopts and becomes the leading proponent of the miasma theory which assumes transmission through airborne contamination resulting from the Whitehead is known and respected within the community because of his religious position, but also because of his interest and work in trying to nail down the cause and effect which results in the spread of cholera.

One is a priest living near the Soho neighborhood of Lewis. The 1854 cholera outbreak in London had begun.įrom that point on, the story essentially becomes a tale of two men and a conflict between two opposing theories: miasma versus contagion. She took one of the soiled diapers, walked down to her cellar and casually turned the clothe into a disposable diaper by tossing it into the cesspool there. On August 28, Sarah Lewis called for a doctor for help with her infant baby who was terribly ill with noxious emissions existing from both ends.

Scavengers picking through the transported sewer clogs can also get in on the revenue of waste disposal by selling whatever they find of worth. Unfortunately, their means of disposal involves merely transporting that material to the farthest reaches of the city. So bad is the waste disposal system that “night-soil men” are paid to unclog the unmentionably horrific material causing backup in the city’s sewers. The most populous city in Europe is almost literally an open sewer. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own. The reason the cholera body count hadn’t grown exponentially was that only the Lewis family could access the cesspool-therefore, baby Lewis’s waste was the only source of cholera in the well, and the cholera agent wasn’t growing exponentially.These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. Whitehead realized that the surveyor had answered his objections to Snow’s theory. Earlier investigations had missed the cesspool connection, perhaps because they were too focused on miasma. He commissioned surveyors to examine the cesspool, and the surveyor found that it had, indeed, leaked into the well. Whitehead realized that the baby’s cholera evacuations must have been deposited near the Broad Street well. Whitehead interviewed Sarah Lewis and learned that she’d thrown soiled diapers into a cesspool. While studying the data, he came across the medical report for baby Lewis, who’d experienced diarrhea before dying. He began searching for an “index case”-i.e., the earliest cholera victim of 1854. As the data about the cholera outbreak continued to pile up, Whitehead began to believe Snow’s theory.

The ghost map by steven johnson