Cholera

The story of the ten days on Broad Street can be told as a few hundred humans who drank pump water, got sick and died over a few weeks’ time. But the entire story is more complex and includes urban development and bacterial life cycles. The cities are the largest footprints on Earth left by man; the microbes are the smallest entity. The fates of the largest and smallest life are dependent upon one another.

The city had afforded the Vibrio cholerae and other bacteria a new way to mass produce. Without the dense population, the bacteria would not have been as devastating and would not have interested John Snow. A wide view of the city, called an epidemiology, was necessary to investigate the origin and spread of disease. John Snow founded the London Epidemiological Society just a few years before the Soho epidemic. Although the science of...