April 7, 2022 • 38 mins
Dr. Jon Snow -- no relation to the guy from A Song of Ice and Fire -- was in a pickle. Cholera was ravaging London, particularly in the Soho area, and no one knew how to stop it from spreading like poisonous wildfire. As the crisis raged on, Snow was able to use his medical knowledge and amateur detective skills to figure out where the contagion was coming from. His big breakthrough? Folks at the local brewery, who were known for day drinking, seemed to avoid the infection almost entirely. Tune in to learn how beer (kind of) saved London.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
so much for tuning in. Who doesn't love London? Who
doesn't love beer? Who doesn't love cholera? Record? Scratch? What? What?
What are we talking about? Well? First, who'd like to
introduce our super producer, Mr Max Williams. They called me
ben No, we're coming in hot And I think one
(00:49):
of those things is not like the other. I think
you can love London and beer and not love color.
I think that's that's entirely a plausible scenario. Agreed, Agreed,
And this is also it's funny. We're talking about today's
episode off air for a while, and one of the
things that we noticed is that we've run into several
(01:12):
stories about London and cholera. You may have heard our
earlier episode on the Train of the Dead or the
so called Great Stink, But today we're we're returning to
this period in time with a little bit of a
different take. Now, if you you've listened to our previous
(01:33):
episodes Ridiculous Historians, you know that in eighteen fifty four,
there was an outbreak of cholera in London, specifically in
the Soho district. And previously we had introduced a physician
with a name that was not associated with Game of
Thrones at the time, doctor named John Snow. Yeah, this
(01:54):
guy knows lots of stuff, unlike John Snow, who who
knows nothing but also new some things, but also a
little bit dumb. John Snow is this fellow's name. It's true.
He was an epidemiologist, I guess, which you could refer
to before that was even a thing. He sort of
like blaze the trail for that field, um, and he
was very much responsible for figuring out why so many
(02:18):
people in London and and the surrounding areas were getting
so very sick. There was at the time this concept
known as miasthma theory, the idea of bad air, you know,
and that that that these diseases and maladies were being
spread through the air. Snow, through some trial and error
and uh, you know, some crack medical detective work, figured
(02:41):
out that wasn't the case at all, and uh he
traced it to the water. And one thing that really
helped him do that was isolating the beer drinkers from
the people who were drinking like well water and then
the water that came from the pumps, which oftentimes was
directly pumped from the Thames River, which, as we know
(03:03):
even today, it's not in the place you'd really even
want to take a dip let alone drink water from.
But um, that's the broad Strokes. Let's set up. Let's
backtrack a little bit. Um. We've had six worldwide cholera
epidemics from eighteen seventeen to nineteen twenty three, and during
one of the biggest outbreaks in London, the water and
the Thames got so bad that there was a political
(03:25):
cartoon that dubbed it a monster soup uh, and it
was like one of those really you know, cool kind
of stylized political cartoons that had it full of like
all these like hydras and locknest monsters and chimeras and
Gorgon's and all that good stuff. And check out Mental
Flaws for an article about five infamous epidemics that we
hope to never see again where we pulled sminfo for
(03:48):
this episode. Flash to eighteen fifty four though, and also
check out Vintage News by Diana Rodesca. Uh. The eighteen
fifty four cholera outbreak of Broad Street, so during eighteen
fifty four, which is the third epidemic. Parts of London
were bad when it came to cholera, very like To
(04:11):
be clear, it was in multiple areas of town, but
the biggest, worst part of the outbreak was in Soho.
In the space of just three days, a hundred and
twenty seven people died, and just a month later there
were five hundred plus people dead from cholera. And folks
again thought that it spread through my asthma, which is
(04:33):
the air being bad, specifically air rising from the soil
at night, you know. So you could say these people
are getting sick. Maybe they lived by a graveyard or
some other place where the soil might be considered tainted.
But the thing is, the Soho of that time was
not the Soho of today. It didn't have all the cool,
(04:55):
you know, gentrified stuff, the restaurants, the clubs, the have
been diversions as they're called sometimes. Uh. Instead it was
a slum. It was a really tough place to live.
There were a lot of sanitation problems, not least of
which the fact that the wells from which the population
(05:16):
got their water were like right next to cess pits
and trash piles and they knew what cholera was, right.
They didn't know how it spread, but they knew its effects.
And this is where John Snow, who has already made
his name as an obstetrician. Uh he this is where
he comes in. He publishes this Treatise on the Mode
(05:39):
of Communication Cholera in eighteen forty nine, and he says, look,
it's not bad air, folks. The plague here is caused
by dirty drinking water. It's caused by pollution, it's caused
by sewage, and it always commences with disturbances of the
functions of the alimentary can out. Everybody ignored him. Yeah,
(06:02):
even his fellow physicians, the medical um community. I thought
that he was really overreaching, because, you know, it was
sort of like the equivalent of like the idea of
the humors, you know, back in the earliest days of
of medical of medicine um, the idea of having too
much bile or being like overloaded with one particular humor
or another being like colocky or what has it been
(06:25):
not colloquy? Yeah, yeah, that's it. Yeah, um, the idea
that your temperament would be in your you know, your
health would be determined by the balance of these like
ephemeral kind of like substances that existed in the body.
And of course all that stuff has been debunked. Uh.
It's very much akin to like leeching and bad blood.
You know, this is bad air and it was totally
accepted by the medical community. So that being the case
(06:51):
is miasthma theory, you know, being the that's what it is,
and then we can do about that. That's the funny
thing about it too, is like it's the theory that
really doesn't have much recourse. You can't exactly suck the
b at air out of the sky and filter. They
didn't have that technology. At least, you know, John snow
had a theory of a thing that we could maybe avoid.
Let's just try it out. What do you say we
try to you know, drinke water from elsewhere, or like
(07:12):
boil the water or do something to to purify it.
At least he didn't get thrown in an asylum like
the guy asked people to wash their hands shout outside exactly.
That's how things were in those days. These were very
you didn't want to upset the apple cart of science. Um,
which is apparently an apple cart situation. Uh, so caller
albres continued in London and Newcastle and in eighteen fifty
(07:34):
three more than ten thousand people lost their lives due
to this outbreak due to this epidemic, and then again
in the summer of eighteen fifty four UH in Southwark,
London and Lambeth, which is south of the Thames, we
saw another devastating outbreak and then the big one hit
in Soho. But we set up the episode with August
thirty one, seven people in three days were killed and
(07:57):
that people started to freak out and just flee this city.
And this was very similar behavior to what had happened
during the Bubonic plague in sixteen sixty six. There was
some you know, echoes of that and people were not
sticking around to find out what happened next. Yeah, why
would you. Three quarters of the population and left by
September seven. We do have to point out John Snow. Dr.
(08:19):
Snow lives near Soho, so this is close to home
for him, you know what I mean. I think it's
important to established he's not hanging out in some country
cottage expounding on things based on his own humors of
the time. Look, this was a huge problem and this
kind of disease could be a great equalizer. It was
(08:41):
striking people based on their water sources. They would come
to find in the middle of the eighteen hundreds, you know,
folks didn't have their tushies shout out, tushy, check out
our episode, or running water in homes. It would be
incredibly unusual. Instead, you have a communal pump, you'd have
(09:01):
a town well, and you would get the water that
you used for literally everything, washing, cooking, drinking water. Septic
systems were super old. This is weird, but this for
some reason, this used to fascinate me when I was
a kid reading about this period of time. A lot
of untreated sewage or like animal waste crap from livestock
(09:24):
basically would either be thrown directly into the tims. Back
in the day, it used to be instead of a
sewage system, there used to be this open sewer running
down the middle of streets and you would just throw
your stuff from there, and you would sometimes do it
from the second floor, so it wasn't a common to
(09:44):
get hit with a pile of filth. But they also
had these open pits called cesspools, and to make it worse,
water companies pulled in Nestley. They would go to the tims,
which was a free source of water. They would bottle
the water and then they would h sell it to
pubs and breweries and other businesses. Nobody was checking the sewage.
(10:05):
There was not like a big filter, not even a
primitive filtration system that they ran this through. So Dr
Snow reasonably says, you know, I think it might be
that we're dumping all of our trash in the river
or into these literal centuries old trash piles, and I
(10:27):
think that might be bad for the water. And he
was moting he had thought this for a while, and
the opportunity to really try to prove his theory came
amid this great tragedy of this cholera outbreak. Yeah, and
he he be opined on this. Uh in his journals
um he wrote, within two fifty yards of the spot
(10:50):
where Cambridge Street joins Broad Street, there were upwards a
five hundred fatal attacks of cholera in ten days. As
soon as I became acquainted with the city station, an
extant of this eruption of color, I suspected some contamination
of the water of the much frequented street pump in
(11:11):
Broad Street. Remember that the street pump, that is where
he traced it to, or at least that was the
most obvious culpri Yeah, and picture picture a increasingly sleepless
(11:33):
dr snow working around the clock. Scenes flashback and forth
of him tracing things around the town pump, him talking
to people, him hitting the bricks while there's the sound
of a ticking clock. Well wait, we don't know about
the sound design yet, Max, because second hands on clocks
(11:54):
appeared in the fifteen century on German clocks, but they
didn't really become common until the eight century. So there
you go. Be fun at parties. Anyhow. The idea here
is that he was he was studying this the same
way like a like a civil engineer or a traffic
(12:15):
engineer might sit at a light and study traffic, and
he was looking at public records. He found this strong correlation.
People who lived or worked near the pump, this one
in particular in Broad Street were more likely to use it,
and thus they were also more likely to contract cholera.
He established this correlation. He used a geographical grid to
(12:39):
chart deaths from the outbreak, and in each case he
tried to determine conclusively whether they had access pump water
or whether they were more likely to. And then he
was eventually pretty quickly actually convinced that this pump was
the source of the epidemic. In soho, it's kind of
(12:59):
like finding out the killer lives in your neighborhood. It's
pretty cool though, because I mean he really did take
a strategic approach when all of these other you know,
frankly quack physicians were just blaming you know, the magical
bad air, um, the miasma or whatever, which also we've
seen UM kind of lampooned in political cartoons like like
(13:22):
almost like UM personifying the air as some sort of
like spooky ghost or something like that, you know, with
like evil tendril type fingers or whatever. I we've seen
those before and previous episodes where we've talked about this subject.
But he traced it to that pump, and he was
able to kind of, like you know, like I said,
do some kind of slew thing. And he asked around,
and he found the proprietor of this uh little cafe
(13:44):
in that neighborhood who served water to our customers directly
from the Broad Street pump along with their meals, and
she personally knew of nine customers that had gotten cholera.
This is kind of cute. There's a popular kind of
a sweet drink at the time was called sure it Um.
Not the sure but we know the delicious fruity, creamy
ice cream type substitute. But this was a powder that
(14:07):
you would put in water and it would get fizzy um.
And in the Broad Street area of Soho, the water
that was used for that very popular drink was from
the Ding Ding Ding Broad Street pump as well and snow. Really,
at this point, I'm starting to believe that this was
the source of the outbreak. So he started to look
(14:27):
at different clusters around the neighborhood of of of outbreaks
of cases and then you know, through process of elimination,
determine whether or not they had drank water from that pump.
And he actually started to collect and kola this data
and what would ultimately become like a cholera map kind
of thing. Yeah, yeah, and this is a brilliant move.
(14:50):
You're also seeing some testing for the people who we're
totally fine, who didn't drink from this particular pump and
checking whether or not they also avoided cholera. This is
a very important part of the test, and this is
where we find the ridiculous thing. This helped Snow rule
(15:13):
out possible sources of contagions. He found some examples of
people who didn't have cholera. One was a workhouse, which
is basically a prison. At this point. The workhouse in
the Soho area adjacent to it had over five in mates,
(15:34):
but almost no colliary cases. Snow discovers it's because the
workhouse has its own well and it brings in water
from outside of the area. There's also and this is
this is the funny part. This is the ridiculous part. Max.
If you were waiting, fellow, ridiculous stories. If you're waiting,
(15:56):
Snow also found there's a brewery on Broad Street, which
should like ground zero for colliery cases. But the guys
who work at this brewery don't get cholera because they're
drinking so much malt liquor. It's it's because according to
the owner of the brewery, a guy named Mr. Huggins,
(16:17):
he said, look, my guys drink the liquor they make,
or they drink water from the breweries. Well, we don't
go drink that Broad Street pump water. And none of
them at cholera because they were day drinking. To jump
in here. I mean, this is actually a very um
common trend, and it's around this time period, especially earlier.
Like my dad has a book about the Founding Fathers
(16:41):
and their alcohol youth. It's like, you know, copious, like
John Adams woke up in the morning and the first
thing he did was drink too hard ciders. Like he's
in bed drinking these hard ciders because it's like, you know,
for a very long time, drinking the water would kill you,
as we're seeing literally in the story, but even like
centuries before that. So I mean, I just find it funny,
(17:03):
like it's part of history. I feel like we don't
really ever talk about, but it's pretty entertaining it It's funny,
and people got the job done. It's like we joke
about like mad Men era, like you know, uh, Madison
Avenue executives and stuff in the fifties and sixties, like
drinking highballs all day long. But it goes back way
farther than that, and people knew how to hold their
booze and get stuff done. Apparently, it would seem I mean,
(17:25):
and I will say as a as a restaurant manager,
for a number of years. I've been through a number
of breweries and guess what, they're still drinking the beer
and the berries. This is not something that's changed, right,
There's there's this other thing. Um, you know, we we
should point this out. There's always fascinating me too, in
this period of time when water would sometimes we considered
(17:48):
unsafe and you would drink of for minute beverage. But
in this period, in this period of time, the average
person wasn't drinking like distilled liquor, like brandy or something.
It was going to be wine or need or beer.
It is fascinating though. I love Let's give a shout
out once again to Max's brother Alex for his famous
(18:11):
eggnog recipe, which shows you just how boozy George Washington
in particular was. Yeah, and I mean, you know, it's
a good point. Like all of this stuff was relatively
lower alcohol by volume than liquor, so it wasn't like
they were waking up and pounding shots or something like that.
This is something that you could maintain on. And I
just got back from a trip to Germany and that's
(18:32):
still the way they drink there. Everybody's people drinking kinds
of beer for breakfast, you know, but it's like low
a b V and you can maintain that. Me personally,
beer makes me super sleepy, not really drunk, It just
makes because to the amount you have to drink of
it to get a buzz for me just puts me down.
(18:53):
I feel like I've eaten three loaves of bread. So
I just that part of it doesn't click for me.
But it is kind of a built in safe hard
to keep people from getting like way too rowdy. Because
I noticed I didn't notice any bar fights while I
was there. I didn't notice anybody like slashed or puking
in the streets. I think it is a much more
of a cultural part of their existence. Uh, and they
know how to handle it better. Yeah. Last time I
(19:16):
was in Germany, I one thing that startled me was
he had to get used to the casual drinking. But
you make a great point. I didn't see a ton
of people slashed. I did see a guy pushing a
baby carriage, and you know it's one of those like
I call him action carriages where they've got like the
big back two wheels, the one in the front. Since
(19:38):
the tripod designer Delta design, they have these cup holders,
and this guy was pushing this off the off the
train and then he lifted up, Uh, he's coming out
of the stage. He lifted up the holder and he
had like a tall boy of some beer, which I'm
assuming is very nice, and it seemed it seemed fine.
But yeah, that's true. Lest we paint these factory workers
(20:02):
or these brewery workers as some kind of like raging,
wet brained alcoholics, we do have to point out yet
it's a benefit for them because it's just a side
benefit of where they work. You know, if they worked
at a ham factory, they probably eat a lot of ham.
It also wasn't a case of them just being completely
(20:22):
dooped to the moon every day. It's just like you
guys said, it's a more casual thing for them. But
they didn't have cholera. And Snow goes to this other
factory that is near the pump, and this one's at
thirty seven Broad Street, and he finds out sixteen workers
(20:42):
there died from cholera. Also, the factory was known to
keep two tubs of water on hand for employees to
drink at work, and that water was ding ding ding
from the Broad Street pump. That's right. Then we have
another case of an aunt and her knee who died
because of cholera. And this was one that really perplexed
(21:04):
Snow because the aunt did not live near Soho at all,
nor did her niece, and there was no direct connection
to the deadly pump, the deadly Broad Street pump. But
he did some interviews like he like he was wont
to do, and he talked to the woman's son who
said his mother had lived in the Broad Street area
(21:26):
at one point and liked the water so much that
she had bottled it up and and saved it and
like you know, had like a stockpile of it in
her home. Let's be honest, what's that flavor coming from?
Good Lord, it's coming from the poop, It's coming from
coming from stuff, animal blood. If it's if it do
(21:48):
you know what? It could be anything? It could be
like a foot. It could just be a foot that's
slowly rotting. She might just be in the foot flavored water. Yeah,
it's possible. It Satia staro. And just to clarify, she
she had had stockpiled some of it, but also was
having like she had it delivered to her. I guess
it's some kind of service. Um, that's pretty posh. Don't
(22:12):
you think she would have had to spend a little
extra to get special delivery of water from across town?
That is so weird. The privilege here seems seems a
little weird, right for modern example, It's almost like saying, uh,
we've traced the latest clamydia outbreak too. Uh, sun basket
(22:32):
the delivery service, but not Hello Fresh with sponsors, no show. Yeah,
that's true. I mean it's and and it's it's it's
sad because they died literally the next day. They were
able to trace the pumping of the water that they
drank to August thirty one, which was the day of
the outbreak. Uh. And she and her niece would would
(22:55):
take the air on the verandah and share a glass
of cool water for refreshment, and then they died the
very next day. Yeah. And Snow is a heroic scientist,
just just so you know, folks, because he is still
(23:16):
at this point proving a theory. By this point, he
is more than certain that cholera is coming from the
well water. But what happens next in September eighteen fifty
four completely cements his understanding. He uses a microscope and
takes a sample of water from the Broad Street pump
(23:39):
and in it he sees white, flaculent particles. He goes
to the board of Guardians over at St. James Parish
and says, look, I know this might sound crazy, but
you've got to disable this pump, remove the handle, shut
it down. They're killing people. And the folks of the
parish aren't totally buying his story. But again, so many
(24:03):
people are contracting cholera and dying that they're desperate enough
to try anything. So the handle gets removed on September eight,
and people can't draw water from the pump. It doesn't work.
It's such an easy, foolproof solution. And at this point,
(24:24):
which yeah, and then cases dropped. Cases almost immediately drops.
So let's get some fanfare. Noise Todctor John snow, wait wait,
cut it, cut it, no, no, Max, cut it. Because
the despite the fact that he was absolutely correct about this,
public officials were still like, this guy's a crackpot. Well,
(24:45):
that's the thing. He had to fight to the nail
to even get them to listen to him at all,
even in the slightest and he was the whole time risking,
you know, professional uh annihilation essentially because he was, you know,
pushing the He was the to his figure pushing the
rock up the hill. Everyone was pointing at him and
laughing and saying, why are you doing that, idiot? And
(25:06):
so yeah, even though they did the thing that he suggested,
um and the cases dropped precipitously, still wasn't enough. They
refused to do anything to actually address the problem. How
about that sounds familiar. It's like, oh, yeah, well, well,
well we'll pinch off this one source, but we're not
actually gonna go beyond that any further. So they refused
(25:28):
to clean up all of these open sewers and cesspools,
and the Board of Public Health put out a report
saying literally that they saw no reason to take on
Snow's beliefs um and they called what he was putting
out their mere conjectures. Actually the word they used was
(25:51):
suggestions cord, which feels like there's a Michael Scott somewhere
in the parish or on the board of Uh. Yeah,
they still they still insisted on attributing the cholera to
mi asthma or bad air. But over the years, Snow's
theory begins to gain traction because he is correct, and
(26:16):
people would take his research and later use it to
gain a new perspective, a new understanding of how to
protect themselves from cholera. But there's one question he didn't answer.
There's one thing that left him baffled. He could not
prove where the contamination originated, Like, how did the okay,
(26:39):
if it comes from the pump, how did the water
get dirty in the first place? We joked about foot
water or um let's be honest, we're all we're all
mature people here. We can say it poop water. And
and there was the the officials said, there's no way
sewage from our town pipes leaked to the pump. And
(27:01):
Snow said, I can't figure out whether the sew had
just coming from open sewers. Maybe they're drains that are
just going straight into the groundwater, maybe they're cesspools. But
someone did solve the mystery, and they did it because
they wanted to prove John Snow wrong. Let's be Reverend
(27:22):
Henry Whitehead, last name, all one word. He said, the
outbreak was not caused by tainted water. It was caused
by wait for it, god, divine intervention. And so he
investigated this, he couldn't find any proof and is published
(27:44):
reports in fact confirm what John Snow said. And then
John Snow was able to use Reverend Whitehead's research to
learn something pretty interesting, because you see, Whitehead was conducting
interviews of his own. That's right. He interviewed a woman
who lived at forty Broad Street whose child had gotten
(28:05):
cholera from a different source. Right. But since there weren't
really any regulations as to you know, where sewage was
supposed to go and and where one might wash, you know,
soiled clothes, this mother would wash. You know, this is
not the days of disposable diapers. This is the days
of cloth diapers that you would reuse because no one
(28:27):
could afford anything like that that that you to use
to just use a sing a single use garment. That's absurd,
because it was so they would be washed and this
particular cholera uh stricken child's dirty diaper. And sorry' all
meant to point out that it gets a little grocer
from here. We're washed in a body of water that
(28:47):
ran off into into the the thamps, which was directly
um feeding that um that Broad Street pump. Yeah, so
he said, this is what caused that horrific cholera outbreak,
and about a year later a magazine of the time
called the build publishers Reverend Whitehead's findings, and then they
(29:11):
issue a challenge to the powers that be of Soho,
and they say, closed that cesspool, repair the sewers and drains,
because in spite of and there's a good point, in
spite of the late numerous deaths, so they say, we
have all the materials for a fresh epidemic or a
fresh edemic. They did not use that portmanteau, but missed opportunity.
(29:35):
And it's still it still took it still took a
long time, like we're talking most we're talking spans of
years before public officials did make those recommended improvements in
that color infected kid who was an innocent did turn
out to be the vector for the spread there in Soho.
(29:56):
And all in all, the contamination OUs more than six deaths,
but there would have been many more deaths were it
not for John Snow's investigation, and were it not for
the delightfully boozy fact brewery workers that he was able
to he was able to use to kind of correlate
(30:19):
the spread of this pump water and the spread of
this contagion. There's a great Wired article. Uh, Noel Maximum,
we both we all looked at this. Uh there's a
great Wired article where you can read more in depth
about his mapping process and about how he was able
(30:42):
to convince the local authorities to finally like, can you
imagine you have the They treated him a little like
a crackpot. They were like, all right, well, doc, we'll
take the handles off. But that's it, you know, we'll
see what happens. So he was really fighting the hour
for a while. So shout out to Randy Alfred over
(31:02):
at Wired for that one. Like we said that he
did leave a legacy. I mean, it's twenty twenty two,
we're talking about him today, right absolutely. I mean the
idea of sanitation is key, you know, to having a
functional society where people aren't you know, falling out from illness.
I mean, and again we know we're living in the
midst of a pandemic right now, I mean, hopefully the
(31:23):
back end of one, but yet there it is. I mean,
we certainly had to adopt very quickly some very specific
sanitation regulations in terms of you know, showing vaccination and
wearing masks and all of that stuff, and it is
in the service of the public good. Uh. And you
know the COVID nineteen pandemic obviously killed thousands and thousands
of people. Um, so you gotta take that stuff seriously.
(31:45):
At the very least, public health officials did take it seriously.
And I would argue that's largely because of the legacy
of Dr John Snow. Yeah, agreed. If you go to
the site of the original pump and soho today, you'll
see something interesting. You'll see a plaque and you'll see
(32:06):
a pump without a handle. That's on purpose. It is
a monument to John Snow. The exact pump location is
a little bit different. The street it's on is named
Broadwick Street now, and you'll see a colored sidewalk slab.
And you know what that slab is right outside, folks,
(32:27):
the john Snow Pub where you can drop in and
have a guarantee Colera free time. They did not make
that guarantee. I just made that guarantee. But I feel
like that's a safe one to make, right. I think
it's a safe guarantee to make on their behalf. Then
the beer and water collar free. But you know, as
(32:49):
we know I mean today, I mean, you know, things
like kombucha and you know, probiotics and all of that,
and these kinds of drinks are known to be good
for your health and um, you know, cultivating good gut
back tierria that can help you fight disease. So the
beer situation, while it also had to do with the
fact that the water was different and that it was
you know, treated, the actual fermented angle of it is
(33:12):
something that has carried on today and it's still very
popular necessarily associated with like okay, drink beer for your health,
but fermented beverages are known to to do something very
positive for people's you know, day to day health. Outside
of Germany. I think in Germany should beer for your health?
Uh brust But yeah, it's it's a fascinating story. And
(33:34):
there is a study from the Journal of the Royal
Society of Medicine that's not to not too out of date.
It's from eleven and this study is called simply Alcohol
and Cholera by Janet S. Guthrie and DARRYL oho Yan.
The idea is what they did is they used gin.
(33:56):
So this is not a one to one in comparison
with the brewery, but they found and cholera did not
survive more than one hour in any solution that's gin, uh,
and it survived. Like they go through gin, red wine
and ethanol and they look at the I guess the
alcohol percentages in the mixture. So that study is fascinating
(34:24):
to to read if you are if you want to
get a little more in the weeds. But there is Yeah,
there's a little bit of science to it. And just
like you said, no, I think we could do an
entire episode maybe on probiotics. The probiotics are live micro
organisms that are supposed to, you know, help you when
you consume them. Do you get they were drinking raw water?
(34:46):
I haven't. I'm just asking out of curiosity, the same
as raw milk. Isn't that illegal from like a water cow?
It's from a manity, I got you, It's just raw water.
It's uh like I got an older article. I saw
a daily show a little litt bit about it. But
I space look just like someone went out to a
creak and got a bunch of water and now sells
it for like for a to and a half gallon thing.
(35:07):
Oh that's weird. Yeah, No, I've I've when I'm like
living in the wild, or's something I've drank from creeks
or streams? But would you pay forty dollars for a
jug of raw water in your part? Wait? Us dollars? Yes?
How did that change at all? Well? It could have
(35:28):
been some other kind of currency, you know, it could
have been it was forty roubles man, sign me up anyhow,
walk down the street from that joke. This one was
a blast, and we hope that we hope that you
enjoyed this episode of Folks. We also hope that you
take some time to check out some of our earlier
episodes on London. There's always something weird going on there.
(35:52):
If you want a particularly grizzly story about London and street,
then go over to our show Stuff They Don't Want
You to Know and check out was Benjamin Franklin a
serial killer? Not gonna spoil the answer, but that was
a wild drive, don't you think? No? It was? I mean, yeah,
(36:13):
he definitely was up to some some weird stuff, but
no spoilers here. Check it out, and also check out
our previous episode on the Great Stink of London and
check out our sister podcast Stuff you Missed in History Class?
Who've also delved into some of this London sanitation nonsense.
And Uh, in the meantime, why not to find us
on the internet. Uh, we are on Facebook at Ridiculous Historians,
(36:38):
as any of our Facebook group. You can also find
us on Instagram as a show or as human people.
I am at how now Noel Brown exclusively on Instagram,
But then I believe you're in two internet locales under
this persona. Yes, you can find me folks on Instagram,
where in a burst of creativity, I have calling myself
at ben Bowl and bo w l I n uh.
(36:59):
If you pop on over there and befriend me, then
you will get behind the scenes looks at some of
the stuff I'm working on, research I'm doing, and my
various strange non work or semi work related adventures. For instance,
over on Instagram, check out my reels. I have just
discovered a very strange subterranean passage here in Atlanta, and
(37:23):
it goes far beyond the footprint of the building. I'm
quite excited about it. I'm going back. I want to
see how far the tunnel goes. So that might be
the end of me. We'll see. But in the meantime,
you can also follow me on Twitter if you're not
on Instagram and client, that's happen bull in hs W.
And while you are there on Twitter, why not follow
our good pal Mr Max Williams. Yes, you can find
(37:45):
me exclusively on Twitter at at L Underscore Max Williams.
So you will mostly see me retweeting about Star Trek,
which was a very exciting day yesterday. Oh yeah, the
new series premiered. Oh no, it didn't premiere, It was
just on now. P card trailer which was not very
exciting for me and my eight year old self came
out and then But mostly you just find me trolling
(38:06):
Ben because you know, let's be honestly deserves it. Yeah,
I'm the worst. We'll see you next time, folks. For
more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart
Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
so much for tuning in. Who doesn't love London? Who
doesn't love beer? Who doesn't love cholera? Record? Scratch? What? What?
What are we talking about? Well? First, who'd like to
introduce our super producer, Mr Max Williams. They called me
ben No, we're coming in hot And I think one
(00:49):
of those things is not like the other. I think
you can love London and beer and not love color.
I think that's that's entirely a plausible scenario. Agreed, Agreed,
And this is also it's funny. We're talking about today's
episode off air for a while, and one of the
things that we noticed is that we've run into several
(01:12):
stories about London and cholera. You may have heard our
earlier episode on the Train of the Dead or the
so called Great Stink, But today we're we're returning to
this period in time with a little bit of a
different take. Now, if you you've listened to our previous
(01:33):
episodes Ridiculous Historians, you know that in eighteen fifty four,
there was an outbreak of cholera in London, specifically in
the Soho district. And previously we had introduced a physician
with a name that was not associated with Game of
Thrones at the time, doctor named John Snow. Yeah, this
(01:54):
guy knows lots of stuff, unlike John Snow, who who
knows nothing but also new some things, but also a
little bit dumb. John Snow is this fellow's name. It's true.
He was an epidemiologist, I guess, which you could refer
to before that was even a thing. He sort of
like blaze the trail for that field, um, and he
was very much responsible for figuring out why so many
(02:18):
people in London and and the surrounding areas were getting
so very sick. There was at the time this concept
known as miasthma theory, the idea of bad air, you know,
and that that that these diseases and maladies were being
spread through the air. Snow, through some trial and error
and uh, you know, some crack medical detective work, figured
(02:41):
out that wasn't the case at all, and uh he
traced it to the water. And one thing that really
helped him do that was isolating the beer drinkers from
the people who were drinking like well water and then
the water that came from the pumps, which oftentimes was
directly pumped from the Thames River, which, as we know
(03:03):
even today, it's not in the place you'd really even
want to take a dip let alone drink water from.
But um, that's the broad Strokes. Let's set up. Let's
backtrack a little bit. Um. We've had six worldwide cholera
epidemics from eighteen seventeen to nineteen twenty three, and during
one of the biggest outbreaks in London, the water and
the Thames got so bad that there was a political
(03:25):
cartoon that dubbed it a monster soup uh, and it
was like one of those really you know, cool kind
of stylized political cartoons that had it full of like
all these like hydras and locknest monsters and chimeras and
Gorgon's and all that good stuff. And check out Mental
Flaws for an article about five infamous epidemics that we
hope to never see again where we pulled sminfo for
(03:48):
this episode. Flash to eighteen fifty four though, and also
check out Vintage News by Diana Rodesca. Uh. The eighteen
fifty four cholera outbreak of Broad Street, so during eighteen
fifty four, which is the third epidemic. Parts of London
were bad when it came to cholera, very like To
(04:11):
be clear, it was in multiple areas of town, but
the biggest, worst part of the outbreak was in Soho.
In the space of just three days, a hundred and
twenty seven people died, and just a month later there
were five hundred plus people dead from cholera. And folks
again thought that it spread through my asthma, which is
(04:33):
the air being bad, specifically air rising from the soil
at night, you know. So you could say these people
are getting sick. Maybe they lived by a graveyard or
some other place where the soil might be considered tainted.
But the thing is, the Soho of that time was
not the Soho of today. It didn't have all the cool,
(04:55):
you know, gentrified stuff, the restaurants, the clubs, the have
been diversions as they're called sometimes. Uh. Instead it was
a slum. It was a really tough place to live.
There were a lot of sanitation problems, not least of
which the fact that the wells from which the population
(05:16):
got their water were like right next to cess pits
and trash piles and they knew what cholera was, right.
They didn't know how it spread, but they knew its effects.
And this is where John Snow, who has already made
his name as an obstetrician. Uh he this is where
he comes in. He publishes this Treatise on the Mode
(05:39):
of Communication Cholera in eighteen forty nine, and he says, look,
it's not bad air, folks. The plague here is caused
by dirty drinking water. It's caused by pollution, it's caused
by sewage, and it always commences with disturbances of the
functions of the alimentary can out. Everybody ignored him. Yeah,
(06:02):
even his fellow physicians, the medical um community. I thought
that he was really overreaching, because, you know, it was
sort of like the equivalent of like the idea of
the humors, you know, back in the earliest days of
of medical of medicine um, the idea of having too
much bile or being like overloaded with one particular humor
or another being like colocky or what has it been
(06:25):
not colloquy? Yeah, yeah, that's it. Yeah, um, the idea
that your temperament would be in your you know, your
health would be determined by the balance of these like
ephemeral kind of like substances that existed in the body.
And of course all that stuff has been debunked. Uh.
It's very much akin to like leeching and bad blood.
You know, this is bad air and it was totally
accepted by the medical community. So that being the case
(06:51):
is miasthma theory, you know, being the that's what it is,
and then we can do about that. That's the funny
thing about it too, is like it's the theory that
really doesn't have much recourse. You can't exactly suck the
b at air out of the sky and filter. They
didn't have that technology. At least, you know, John snow
had a theory of a thing that we could maybe avoid.
Let's just try it out. What do you say we
try to you know, drinke water from elsewhere, or like
(07:12):
boil the water or do something to to purify it.
At least he didn't get thrown in an asylum like
the guy asked people to wash their hands shout outside exactly.
That's how things were in those days. These were very
you didn't want to upset the apple cart of science. Um,
which is apparently an apple cart situation. Uh, so caller
albres continued in London and Newcastle and in eighteen fifty
(07:34):
three more than ten thousand people lost their lives due
to this outbreak due to this epidemic, and then again
in the summer of eighteen fifty four UH in Southwark,
London and Lambeth, which is south of the Thames, we
saw another devastating outbreak and then the big one hit
in Soho. But we set up the episode with August
thirty one, seven people in three days were killed and
(07:57):
that people started to freak out and just flee this city.
And this was very similar behavior to what had happened
during the Bubonic plague in sixteen sixty six. There was
some you know, echoes of that and people were not
sticking around to find out what happened next. Yeah, why
would you. Three quarters of the population and left by
September seven. We do have to point out John Snow. Dr.
(08:19):
Snow lives near Soho, so this is close to home
for him, you know what I mean. I think it's
important to established he's not hanging out in some country
cottage expounding on things based on his own humors of
the time. Look, this was a huge problem and this
kind of disease could be a great equalizer. It was
(08:41):
striking people based on their water sources. They would come
to find in the middle of the eighteen hundreds, you know,
folks didn't have their tushies shout out, tushy, check out
our episode, or running water in homes. It would be
incredibly unusual. Instead, you have a communal pump, you'd have
(09:01):
a town well, and you would get the water that
you used for literally everything, washing, cooking, drinking water. Septic
systems were super old. This is weird, but this for
some reason, this used to fascinate me when I was
a kid reading about this period of time. A lot
of untreated sewage or like animal waste crap from livestock
(09:24):
basically would either be thrown directly into the tims. Back
in the day, it used to be instead of a
sewage system, there used to be this open sewer running
down the middle of streets and you would just throw
your stuff from there, and you would sometimes do it
from the second floor, so it wasn't a common to
(09:44):
get hit with a pile of filth. But they also
had these open pits called cesspools, and to make it worse,
water companies pulled in Nestley. They would go to the tims,
which was a free source of water. They would bottle
the water and then they would h sell it to
pubs and breweries and other businesses. Nobody was checking the sewage.
(10:05):
There was not like a big filter, not even a
primitive filtration system that they ran this through. So Dr
Snow reasonably says, you know, I think it might be
that we're dumping all of our trash in the river
or into these literal centuries old trash piles, and I
(10:27):
think that might be bad for the water. And he
was moting he had thought this for a while, and
the opportunity to really try to prove his theory came
amid this great tragedy of this cholera outbreak. Yeah, and
he he be opined on this. Uh in his journals
um he wrote, within two fifty yards of the spot
(10:50):
where Cambridge Street joins Broad Street, there were upwards a
five hundred fatal attacks of cholera in ten days. As
soon as I became acquainted with the city station, an
extant of this eruption of color, I suspected some contamination
of the water of the much frequented street pump in
(11:11):
Broad Street. Remember that the street pump, that is where
he traced it to, or at least that was the
most obvious culpri Yeah, and picture picture a increasingly sleepless
(11:33):
dr snow working around the clock. Scenes flashback and forth
of him tracing things around the town pump, him talking
to people, him hitting the bricks while there's the sound
of a ticking clock. Well wait, we don't know about
the sound design yet, Max, because second hands on clocks
(11:54):
appeared in the fifteen century on German clocks, but they
didn't really become common until the eight century. So there
you go. Be fun at parties. Anyhow. The idea here
is that he was he was studying this the same
way like a like a civil engineer or a traffic
(12:15):
engineer might sit at a light and study traffic, and
he was looking at public records. He found this strong correlation.
People who lived or worked near the pump, this one
in particular in Broad Street were more likely to use it,
and thus they were also more likely to contract cholera.
He established this correlation. He used a geographical grid to
(12:39):
chart deaths from the outbreak, and in each case he
tried to determine conclusively whether they had access pump water
or whether they were more likely to. And then he
was eventually pretty quickly actually convinced that this pump was
the source of the epidemic. In soho, it's kind of
(12:59):
like finding out the killer lives in your neighborhood. It's
pretty cool though, because I mean he really did take
a strategic approach when all of these other you know,
frankly quack physicians were just blaming you know, the magical
bad air, um, the miasma or whatever, which also we've
seen UM kind of lampooned in political cartoons like like
(13:22):
almost like UM personifying the air as some sort of
like spooky ghost or something like that, you know, with
like evil tendril type fingers or whatever. I we've seen
those before and previous episodes where we've talked about this subject.
But he traced it to that pump, and he was
able to kind of, like you know, like I said,
do some kind of slew thing. And he asked around,
and he found the proprietor of this uh little cafe
(13:44):
in that neighborhood who served water to our customers directly
from the Broad Street pump along with their meals, and
she personally knew of nine customers that had gotten cholera.
This is kind of cute. There's a popular kind of
a sweet drink at the time was called sure it Um.
Not the sure but we know the delicious fruity, creamy
ice cream type substitute. But this was a powder that
(14:07):
you would put in water and it would get fizzy um.
And in the Broad Street area of Soho, the water
that was used for that very popular drink was from
the Ding Ding Ding Broad Street pump as well and snow. Really,
at this point, I'm starting to believe that this was
the source of the outbreak. So he started to look
(14:27):
at different clusters around the neighborhood of of of outbreaks
of cases and then you know, through process of elimination,
determine whether or not they had drank water from that pump.
And he actually started to collect and kola this data
and what would ultimately become like a cholera map kind
of thing. Yeah, yeah, and this is a brilliant move.
(14:50):
You're also seeing some testing for the people who we're
totally fine, who didn't drink from this particular pump and
checking whether or not they also avoided cholera. This is
a very important part of the test, and this is
where we find the ridiculous thing. This helped Snow rule
(15:13):
out possible sources of contagions. He found some examples of
people who didn't have cholera. One was a workhouse, which
is basically a prison. At this point. The workhouse in
the Soho area adjacent to it had over five in mates,
(15:34):
but almost no colliary cases. Snow discovers it's because the
workhouse has its own well and it brings in water
from outside of the area. There's also and this is
this is the funny part. This is the ridiculous part. Max.
If you were waiting, fellow, ridiculous stories. If you're waiting,
(15:56):
Snow also found there's a brewery on Broad Street, which
should like ground zero for colliery cases. But the guys
who work at this brewery don't get cholera because they're
drinking so much malt liquor. It's it's because according to
the owner of the brewery, a guy named Mr. Huggins,
(16:17):
he said, look, my guys drink the liquor they make,
or they drink water from the breweries. Well, we don't
go drink that Broad Street pump water. And none of
them at cholera because they were day drinking. To jump
in here. I mean, this is actually a very um
common trend, and it's around this time period, especially earlier.
Like my dad has a book about the Founding Fathers
(16:41):
and their alcohol youth. It's like, you know, copious, like
John Adams woke up in the morning and the first
thing he did was drink too hard ciders. Like he's
in bed drinking these hard ciders because it's like, you know,
for a very long time, drinking the water would kill you,
as we're seeing literally in the story, but even like
centuries before that. So I mean, I just find it funny,
(17:03):
like it's part of history. I feel like we don't
really ever talk about, but it's pretty entertaining it It's funny,
and people got the job done. It's like we joke
about like mad Men era, like you know, uh, Madison
Avenue executives and stuff in the fifties and sixties, like
drinking highballs all day long. But it goes back way
farther than that, and people knew how to hold their
booze and get stuff done. Apparently, it would seem I mean,
(17:25):
and I will say as a as a restaurant manager,
for a number of years. I've been through a number
of breweries and guess what, they're still drinking the beer
and the berries. This is not something that's changed, right,
There's there's this other thing. Um, you know, we we
should point this out. There's always fascinating me too, in
this period of time when water would sometimes we considered
(17:48):
unsafe and you would drink of for minute beverage. But
in this period, in this period of time, the average
person wasn't drinking like distilled liquor, like brandy or something.
It was going to be wine or need or beer.
It is fascinating though. I love Let's give a shout
out once again to Max's brother Alex for his famous
(18:11):
eggnog recipe, which shows you just how boozy George Washington
in particular was. Yeah, and I mean, you know, it's
a good point. Like all of this stuff was relatively
lower alcohol by volume than liquor, so it wasn't like
they were waking up and pounding shots or something like that.
This is something that you could maintain on. And I
just got back from a trip to Germany and that's
(18:32):
still the way they drink there. Everybody's people drinking kinds
of beer for breakfast, you know, but it's like low
a b V and you can maintain that. Me personally,
beer makes me super sleepy, not really drunk, It just
makes because to the amount you have to drink of
it to get a buzz for me just puts me down.
(18:53):
I feel like I've eaten three loaves of bread. So
I just that part of it doesn't click for me.
But it is kind of a built in safe hard
to keep people from getting like way too rowdy. Because
I noticed I didn't notice any bar fights while I
was there. I didn't notice anybody like slashed or puking
in the streets. I think it is a much more
of a cultural part of their existence. Uh, and they
know how to handle it better. Yeah. Last time I
(19:16):
was in Germany, I one thing that startled me was
he had to get used to the casual drinking. But
you make a great point. I didn't see a ton
of people slashed. I did see a guy pushing a
baby carriage, and you know it's one of those like
I call him action carriages where they've got like the
big back two wheels, the one in the front. Since
(19:38):
the tripod designer Delta design, they have these cup holders,
and this guy was pushing this off the off the
train and then he lifted up, Uh, he's coming out
of the stage. He lifted up the holder and he
had like a tall boy of some beer, which I'm
assuming is very nice, and it seemed it seemed fine.
But yeah, that's true. Lest we paint these factory workers
(20:02):
or these brewery workers as some kind of like raging,
wet brained alcoholics, we do have to point out yet
it's a benefit for them because it's just a side
benefit of where they work. You know, if they worked
at a ham factory, they probably eat a lot of ham.
It also wasn't a case of them just being completely
(20:22):
dooped to the moon every day. It's just like you
guys said, it's a more casual thing for them. But
they didn't have cholera. And Snow goes to this other
factory that is near the pump, and this one's at
thirty seven Broad Street, and he finds out sixteen workers
(20:42):
there died from cholera. Also, the factory was known to
keep two tubs of water on hand for employees to
drink at work, and that water was ding ding ding
from the Broad Street pump. That's right. Then we have
another case of an aunt and her knee who died
because of cholera. And this was one that really perplexed
(21:04):
Snow because the aunt did not live near Soho at all,
nor did her niece, and there was no direct connection
to the deadly pump, the deadly Broad Street pump. But
he did some interviews like he like he was wont
to do, and he talked to the woman's son who
said his mother had lived in the Broad Street area
(21:26):
at one point and liked the water so much that
she had bottled it up and and saved it and
like you know, had like a stockpile of it in
her home. Let's be honest, what's that flavor coming from?
Good Lord, it's coming from the poop, It's coming from
coming from stuff, animal blood. If it's if it do
(21:48):
you know what? It could be anything? It could be
like a foot. It could just be a foot that's
slowly rotting. She might just be in the foot flavored water. Yeah,
it's possible. It Satia staro. And just to clarify, she
she had had stockpiled some of it, but also was
having like she had it delivered to her. I guess
it's some kind of service. Um, that's pretty posh. Don't
(22:12):
you think she would have had to spend a little
extra to get special delivery of water from across town?
That is so weird. The privilege here seems seems a
little weird, right for modern example, It's almost like saying, uh,
we've traced the latest clamydia outbreak too. Uh, sun basket
(22:32):
the delivery service, but not Hello Fresh with sponsors, no show. Yeah,
that's true. I mean it's and and it's it's it's
sad because they died literally the next day. They were
able to trace the pumping of the water that they
drank to August thirty one, which was the day of
the outbreak. Uh. And she and her niece would would
(22:55):
take the air on the verandah and share a glass
of cool water for refreshment, and then they died the
very next day. Yeah. And Snow is a heroic scientist,
just just so you know, folks, because he is still
(23:16):
at this point proving a theory. By this point, he
is more than certain that cholera is coming from the
well water. But what happens next in September eighteen fifty
four completely cements his understanding. He uses a microscope and
takes a sample of water from the Broad Street pump
(23:39):
and in it he sees white, flaculent particles. He goes
to the board of Guardians over at St. James Parish
and says, look, I know this might sound crazy, but
you've got to disable this pump, remove the handle, shut
it down. They're killing people. And the folks of the
parish aren't totally buying his story. But again, so many
(24:03):
people are contracting cholera and dying that they're desperate enough
to try anything. So the handle gets removed on September eight,
and people can't draw water from the pump. It doesn't work.
It's such an easy, foolproof solution. And at this point,
(24:24):
which yeah, and then cases dropped. Cases almost immediately drops.
So let's get some fanfare. Noise Todctor John snow, wait wait,
cut it, cut it, no, no, Max, cut it. Because
the despite the fact that he was absolutely correct about this,
public officials were still like, this guy's a crackpot. Well,
(24:45):
that's the thing. He had to fight to the nail
to even get them to listen to him at all,
even in the slightest and he was the whole time risking,
you know, professional uh annihilation essentially because he was, you know,
pushing the He was the to his figure pushing the
rock up the hill. Everyone was pointing at him and
laughing and saying, why are you doing that, idiot? And
(25:06):
so yeah, even though they did the thing that he suggested,
um and the cases dropped precipitously, still wasn't enough. They
refused to do anything to actually address the problem. How
about that sounds familiar. It's like, oh, yeah, well, well,
well we'll pinch off this one source, but we're not
actually gonna go beyond that any further. So they refused
(25:28):
to clean up all of these open sewers and cesspools,
and the Board of Public Health put out a report
saying literally that they saw no reason to take on
Snow's beliefs um and they called what he was putting
out their mere conjectures. Actually the word they used was
(25:51):
suggestions cord, which feels like there's a Michael Scott somewhere
in the parish or on the board of Uh. Yeah,
they still they still insisted on attributing the cholera to
mi asthma or bad air. But over the years, Snow's
theory begins to gain traction because he is correct, and
(26:16):
people would take his research and later use it to
gain a new perspective, a new understanding of how to
protect themselves from cholera. But there's one question he didn't answer.
There's one thing that left him baffled. He could not
prove where the contamination originated, Like, how did the okay,
(26:39):
if it comes from the pump, how did the water
get dirty in the first place? We joked about foot
water or um let's be honest, we're all we're all
mature people here. We can say it poop water. And
and there was the the officials said, there's no way
sewage from our town pipes leaked to the pump. And
(27:01):
Snow said, I can't figure out whether the sew had
just coming from open sewers. Maybe they're drains that are
just going straight into the groundwater, maybe they're cesspools. But
someone did solve the mystery, and they did it because
they wanted to prove John Snow wrong. Let's be Reverend
(27:22):
Henry Whitehead, last name, all one word. He said, the
outbreak was not caused by tainted water. It was caused
by wait for it, god, divine intervention. And so he
investigated this, he couldn't find any proof and is published
(27:44):
reports in fact confirm what John Snow said. And then
John Snow was able to use Reverend Whitehead's research to
learn something pretty interesting, because you see, Whitehead was conducting
interviews of his own. That's right. He interviewed a woman
who lived at forty Broad Street whose child had gotten
(28:05):
cholera from a different source. Right. But since there weren't
really any regulations as to you know, where sewage was
supposed to go and and where one might wash, you know,
soiled clothes, this mother would wash. You know, this is
not the days of disposable diapers. This is the days
of cloth diapers that you would reuse because no one
(28:27):
could afford anything like that that that you to use
to just use a sing a single use garment. That's absurd,
because it was so they would be washed and this
particular cholera uh stricken child's dirty diaper. And sorry' all
meant to point out that it gets a little grocer
from here. We're washed in a body of water that
(28:47):
ran off into into the the thamps, which was directly
um feeding that um that Broad Street pump. Yeah, so
he said, this is what caused that horrific cholera outbreak,
and about a year later a magazine of the time
called the build publishers Reverend Whitehead's findings, and then they
(29:11):
issue a challenge to the powers that be of Soho,
and they say, closed that cesspool, repair the sewers and drains,
because in spite of and there's a good point, in
spite of the late numerous deaths, so they say, we
have all the materials for a fresh epidemic or a
fresh edemic. They did not use that portmanteau, but missed opportunity.
(29:35):
And it's still it still took it still took a
long time, like we're talking most we're talking spans of
years before public officials did make those recommended improvements in
that color infected kid who was an innocent did turn
out to be the vector for the spread there in Soho.
(29:56):
And all in all, the contamination OUs more than six deaths,
but there would have been many more deaths were it
not for John Snow's investigation, and were it not for
the delightfully boozy fact brewery workers that he was able
to he was able to use to kind of correlate
(30:19):
the spread of this pump water and the spread of
this contagion. There's a great Wired article. Uh, Noel Maximum,
we both we all looked at this. Uh there's a
great Wired article where you can read more in depth
about his mapping process and about how he was able
(30:42):
to convince the local authorities to finally like, can you
imagine you have the They treated him a little like
a crackpot. They were like, all right, well, doc, we'll
take the handles off. But that's it, you know, we'll
see what happens. So he was really fighting the hour
for a while. So shout out to Randy Alfred over
(31:02):
at Wired for that one. Like we said that he
did leave a legacy. I mean, it's twenty twenty two,
we're talking about him today, right absolutely. I mean the
idea of sanitation is key, you know, to having a
functional society where people aren't you know, falling out from illness.
I mean, and again we know we're living in the
midst of a pandemic right now, I mean, hopefully the
(31:23):
back end of one, but yet there it is. I mean,
we certainly had to adopt very quickly some very specific
sanitation regulations in terms of you know, showing vaccination and
wearing masks and all of that stuff, and it is
in the service of the public good. Uh. And you
know the COVID nineteen pandemic obviously killed thousands and thousands
of people. Um, so you gotta take that stuff seriously.
(31:45):
At the very least, public health officials did take it seriously.
And I would argue that's largely because of the legacy
of Dr John Snow. Yeah, agreed. If you go to
the site of the original pump and soho today, you'll
see something interesting. You'll see a plaque and you'll see
(32:06):
a pump without a handle. That's on purpose. It is
a monument to John Snow. The exact pump location is
a little bit different. The street it's on is named
Broadwick Street now, and you'll see a colored sidewalk slab.
And you know what that slab is right outside, folks,
(32:27):
the john Snow Pub where you can drop in and
have a guarantee Colera free time. They did not make
that guarantee. I just made that guarantee. But I feel
like that's a safe one to make, right. I think
it's a safe guarantee to make on their behalf. Then
the beer and water collar free. But you know, as
(32:49):
we know I mean today, I mean, you know, things
like kombucha and you know, probiotics and all of that,
and these kinds of drinks are known to be good
for your health and um, you know, cultivating good gut
back tierria that can help you fight disease. So the
beer situation, while it also had to do with the
fact that the water was different and that it was
you know, treated, the actual fermented angle of it is
(33:12):
something that has carried on today and it's still very
popular necessarily associated with like okay, drink beer for your health,
but fermented beverages are known to to do something very
positive for people's you know, day to day health. Outside
of Germany. I think in Germany should beer for your health?
Uh brust But yeah, it's it's a fascinating story. And
(33:34):
there is a study from the Journal of the Royal
Society of Medicine that's not to not too out of date.
It's from eleven and this study is called simply Alcohol
and Cholera by Janet S. Guthrie and DARRYL oho Yan.
The idea is what they did is they used gin.
(33:56):
So this is not a one to one in comparison
with the brewery, but they found and cholera did not
survive more than one hour in any solution that's gin, uh,
and it survived. Like they go through gin, red wine
and ethanol and they look at the I guess the
alcohol percentages in the mixture. So that study is fascinating
(34:24):
to to read if you are if you want to
get a little more in the weeds. But there is Yeah,
there's a little bit of science to it. And just
like you said, no, I think we could do an
entire episode maybe on probiotics. The probiotics are live micro
organisms that are supposed to, you know, help you when
you consume them. Do you get they were drinking raw water?
(34:46):
I haven't. I'm just asking out of curiosity, the same
as raw milk. Isn't that illegal from like a water cow?
It's from a manity, I got you, It's just raw water.
It's uh like I got an older article. I saw
a daily show a little litt bit about it. But
I space look just like someone went out to a
creak and got a bunch of water and now sells
it for like for a to and a half gallon thing.
(35:07):
Oh that's weird. Yeah, No, I've I've when I'm like
living in the wild, or's something I've drank from creeks
or streams? But would you pay forty dollars for a
jug of raw water in your part? Wait? Us dollars? Yes?
How did that change at all? Well? It could have
(35:28):
been some other kind of currency, you know, it could
have been it was forty roubles man, sign me up anyhow,
walk down the street from that joke. This one was
a blast, and we hope that we hope that you
enjoyed this episode of Folks. We also hope that you
take some time to check out some of our earlier
episodes on London. There's always something weird going on there.
(35:52):
If you want a particularly grizzly story about London and street,
then go over to our show Stuff They Don't Want
You to Know and check out was Benjamin Franklin a
serial killer? Not gonna spoil the answer, but that was
a wild drive, don't you think? No? It was? I mean, yeah,
(36:13):
he definitely was up to some some weird stuff, but
no spoilers here. Check it out, and also check out
our previous episode on the Great Stink of London and
check out our sister podcast Stuff you Missed in History Class?
Who've also delved into some of this London sanitation nonsense.
And Uh, in the meantime, why not to find us
on the internet. Uh, we are on Facebook at Ridiculous Historians,
(36:38):
as any of our Facebook group. You can also find
us on Instagram as a show or as human people.
I am at how now Noel Brown exclusively on Instagram,
But then I believe you're in two internet locales under
this persona. Yes, you can find me folks on Instagram,
where in a burst of creativity, I have calling myself
at ben Bowl and bo w l I n uh.
(36:59):
If you pop on over there and befriend me, then
you will get behind the scenes looks at some of
the stuff I'm working on, research I'm doing, and my
various strange non work or semi work related adventures. For instance,
over on Instagram, check out my reels. I have just
discovered a very strange subterranean passage here in Atlanta, and
(37:23):
it goes far beyond the footprint of the building. I'm
quite excited about it. I'm going back. I want to
see how far the tunnel goes. So that might be
the end of me. We'll see. But in the meantime,
you can also follow me on Twitter if you're not
on Instagram and client, that's happen bull in hs W.
And while you are there on Twitter, why not follow
our good pal Mr Max Williams. Yes, you can find
(37:45):
me exclusively on Twitter at at L Underscore Max Williams.
So you will mostly see me retweeting about Star Trek,
which was a very exciting day yesterday. Oh yeah, the
new series premiered. Oh no, it didn't premiere, It was
just on now. P card trailer which was not very
exciting for me and my eight year old self came
out and then But mostly you just find me trolling
(38:06):
Ben because you know, let's be honestly deserves it. Yeah,
I'm the worst. We'll see you next time, folks. For
more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart
Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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