Cholera And Drinking Water In Nineteenth Century London

During the mid 1800s, London had two million people packed into 30 miles of city creating many problems with sanitation. The bad sanitation led to a very dirty city with diseases flourishing, along with a sewer system that was leaking into the drinking wells. John Snow is a physician/anesthesiologist who first makes the link between Cholera and drinking water after studying previous cases. Snow founds the epidemiology center for the city but struggles with medical technology not being very advanced at the time and only being able to look upon incorrect means of disease transmission. Cholera attacked all throughout London, killing the wealthy and the poor. Many ideas were thought of for its occurrence including transmission from person to person, atmospheric pollution, and from the stench of the city. At the time …show more content…
While areas with similar economic statuses with a different drinking well were completely untouched by cholera. He mapped out where people were gathering there water from and based on that, recorded deaths thus allowing for the connection between the two. Many of the men who worked in the sewers surrounded by the terrible smell would live very long, thus allowing to grasp that the disease was spread through drinking the contaminated water. There was also an instance where a sailor stayed in a room and developed cholera and died, then weeks later another man died of cholera in the same room. This lead many people into believing a space could be infected, but Snow was able to rule out this hypothesis as he realized many other people had been in the room without becoming sick. Snow also incorporated statistics by collecting mortality and morbidity rates, which allowed him to really track the disease. Snow conducted many chemistry tests on the drinking water, but at this time the advances of medical technology didn’t allow for complete diagnosis of