The Broad Street Pump

The original location of the Broad Street Pump

N 51 30.783 W 0 8.198

There is a pink curbstone in front of the John Snow Pub in the Soho district of London.  In early Victorian days, this was the location of the Broad Street pump.  Many occupations have cool origin stories.  Aviation has the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk.  Nursing has Florence Nightingale on the battlefields of the Crimean War.  Epidemiology has the story of John Snow and the Broad Street Pump.

The pub sign

When cholera first appeared in England in 1831 it was thought to be spread through airborne vapors or ‘miasmas.’  Outbreaks of cholera were regular occurrences in urban settings in the decades that followed leaving thousands dead each time.  Since it was thought to simply be in the air, absolutely nothing was done to stop these horrific outbreaks.  Dr. John Snow, however, believed that cholera was spread through contaminated water because the disease always started in the alimentary canal.  And there was plenty of contaminated water to blame.  At that time, London was a veritable sewer with rarely-drained cesspits under the houses leaking into the streets and alleyways.  In the summer of 1854, an outbreak of cholera hit London again, beginning in Lambeth and Southwark. 

A replica of the pump with its handle removed
is down the street from the John Snow Pub

Then on August 31^st, the neighborhood of Soho suddenly experienced a sudden and violent outbreak of the disease.  In three days, 127 people living around Broad Street were dead.    Those who could fled for their lives.  In Dr. Snow’s eyes, this was an outstanding opportunity to look for a single water-borne source of the disease, thus providing credence to his theory.  He went house to house, counting the cases of cholera and documenting the onset of the disease.  He compiled a map which clearly showed that the cases surrounded a single water pump on the corner of Broad Street and Cambridge Street (where the John Snow Pub is today, although the streets are now named Broadwick and Lexington).  Dr. Snow examined a sample of the water from the pump under the microscope.  It contained “white, flocculent particles.”  There were a few cases that seemed to be far from the pump but, on further investigation, even these could be linked to it.  On September 7th, he took his findings to the local water authority. After much debate, they reluctantly agreed to remove the handle from the Broad Street pump. The outbreak lessened soon thereafter.  By the end of the month, the crisis was over with 616 Soho residents dead.

John Snow's map of cholera cases around the Broad Street pump

With the aid of Rev. Henry Whitehead, Dr. Snow traced the source of the outbreak to a single case: a child with cholera symptoms had her diapers rinsed into a cesspool only 3 feet from the Broad Street pump.  Whitehead and Snow published their findings in The Builder a year later with the recommendation that all cesspools be drained and abandoned. Expert opinion regarding cholera slowly shifted from the miasma theory to the water-borne theory of Snow.  Many building reforms and urban cleanup would follow including the building of London’s sewer system. Dr. Snow’s methods would be copied in future epidemics and, in time, he would come to be known as the Father of Epidemiology.

Question of the Day: What is ironic about the John Snow pub?

Summers, Judith. Soho -- A History of London's Most Colourful Neighborhood, Bloomsbury, London, 1989, pp. 113-117.