Elin Gregory

Snow – John Snow

{click on the picture to reach the linky list of A to Z participants}

{and yes I completely lost the plot this weekend and didn’t post Q and R. I might do those later, just for completeness}

Editted to add: Yay, this is my 200th post!

So John Snow. Not this one:

My favoured caption for this facial expression is “Oh you did NOT just pee in my pocket!” and it stands him in good stead throughout the series so far. No I posted it because he’s pretty and curly and I dearly love a youth in armour. Besides, his name is Jon.

The one I want to talk about is this one:

 John Snow, a nineteenth century physician who invented a whole new branch of medicine.

London in the 19th century was mostly just one big sewer. They were still using sewers laid down 1800 years before by the Romans, or the streams creeks and rivers that still ran through the city. Disease was rife, as you might expect when people were drawing water from places other people dumped their waste.

The most dreaded disease was cholera but at that time there was very little idea how the disease used to spread. In 1854 an outbreak occurred in Soho in London that tore through a residential area, and John Snow was called in to attend. He was a methodical man, determined not just to treat the symptoms but to find out how the disease had spread. He plotted his patients on a map, noticing that while the majority lived in Broad Street, there were a few other clusters further afield. For the first time a doctor interviewed patients, asking questions about their lives, trying to find out how people who had never been in contact with each other came to be suffering from the same disease.  They all had to have done the same thing and eventually Dr Snow narrowed the point of contact to the public water pump in Broad Street.  That explained the locals, but on questioning he found that one man a few streets away had had a drink from the pump on his way home. Another girl, miles away had drunk from it while visiting her grandmother. The pump was to blame, but why? In the meantime he made the local Waterboard remove the handle from the pump and told the locals to draw their water from a pump a few streets away.

When he investigated further he found that the road had been widened at that point and a cesspit, that had served a house destroyed in a fire, had been paved over and had fallen in, cracking the water pipe and allowing fecal matter to mix with the water that fed up to the Broad Street pump.

Sadly, once the outbreak of cholera was over the Waterboard just put the handle back on the pump again, causing further incidences of the disease. But John Snow had his proof and eventually it was acknowledged that poo and drinking water just don’t mix and the new science of epidemiology was born. Good for you John Snow. To show their gratitude a memorial was made near the site of the Broad Street pump and a pub was named in his honour.

The pub was in the news again quite recently when a young gay couple were told to leave after kissing each other despite several heterosexual couples indulging in very heavy petting being allowed to stay. So it looks as though Victorian values still rule in some parts of the UK.