# JOHN SNOW AND THE BREWERS OF BROAD STREET *Contagion and the Geography of Fear* Author: Elveander Welfendorff · Category: Risk · Date: 2026-11-05 · Place: Warsaw · EW Journal Source: https://ewbyew.com/john-snow-and-the-brewers-of-broad-street/ --- Susannah Eley lived in Hampstead, several miles from Soho, and at the end of the summer of 1854 she died of cholera. She had moved away from Broad Street to higher ground, where the physicians of London agreed that cholera, which travelled in bad air, thinned out, since the air pooled in low and crowded quarters and thinned as one climbed. Mrs Eley kept a fondness for the water of her old street, and her sons sent it up to her. A cart went from Broad Street to West End every day, Snow was told, and it was the custom to take a large bottle of the water, “as she preferred it”. She drank it on 31 August and 1 September, was taken ill that evening and died on the 2nd. A niece who had come to visit from Islington drank some as well, and she died too. Her sons had meant it kindly. Bad air had good credentials. William Farr, the statistician of the General Register Office, had studied the deaths of the epidemic of 1849, about fifteen thousand in London, and found that the higher the ground above the Thames, the lower the mortality. He concluded that elevation protected. Farr’s numbers were exact and his map was a respectable one, the contours of London with the disease thickening in the valleys, and it explained a great deal until somebody asked about Hampstead. John Snow drew another. He was a physician who had made his name giving chloroform to Queen Victoria at the birth of Prince Leopold, and since 1849 he had argued that cholera was swallowed, an idea that had been received with scorn. When the outbreak around the Broad Street pump began at the end of August 1854 he went from door to door and asked the survivors what they had drunk. He called it the most terrible outbreak of cholera ever to occur in the kingdom. Within a week more than three quarters of the residents of the worst streets had fled, those in furnished lodgings first and some leaving their furniture behind, and Snow thought the emptied streets lowered the toll. The counts of the dead differ, and the figure usually given is 616. For the week ending 2 September the registrars had counted 89 deaths, and of the 83 that Snow looked into, 61 had drunk water from the pump. Water from the Broad Street pump was well liked. Snow records that it was used for mixing with spirits in all the public houses around, and likewise at dining-rooms and coffee-shops. Those who stayed well interested him more. Near the pump stood a workhouse in Poland Street with more than five hundred inmates, and only five of them died, since it had its own well. Round the corner stood a brewery, whose proprietor, Mr Huggins, told Snow that he employed above seventy workmen and that none had suffered from cholera in a severe form. It had a deep well, and the men were allowed a certain quantity of malt liquor, which seems to have kept them from the pump. Mr Huggins believed that they did not drink water at all. Of the two arrangements, the workhouse’s well and the brewery’s beer, I prefer the brewery’s. On the evening of 7 September he put his case to the Board of Guardians of St James’s parish. The next day the handle came off the pump. Snow wrote that cases had already begun to decline, and he could not be sure that the well still held the poison. His evidence was the spot map he printed in 1855, a black bar at every house where someone had died, stacked at the doors around the pump and thinning with distance. The authorities were unmoved, and the Board of Health’s committee blamed the miasma. Of Snow’s theory it wrote: “After careful inquiry, we see no reason to adopt this belief.” Eventually the handle was put back. The nearest thing to an experiment came from the river. Two companies supplied south London, both from the Thames, and their pipes ran down the same streets, so that one house might drink from one company and its neighbour from the other. The Lambeth company drew its water from above the sewage, and in the epidemic of 1854 the households supplied by Southwark and Vauxhall lost 315 per 10,000 houses, against 37 for Lambeth and 59 for the rest of London. Some forty thousand houses had been assigned to the one company and some twenty-six thousand to the other without anyone being asked, and Snow could write that “there is no difference whatever in the houses or the people receiving the supply of the two Water Companies”. They differed only in what came out of the tap. Henry Whitehead, assistant curate of St Luke’s and not yet thirty, had begun by doubting all of this. He spent months interviewing his neighbours, and the inquiry ended by supporting Snow and by supplying the thing Snow lacked, the first case. A baby at 40 Broad Street had fallen ill in late August. She was Frances Lewis, five months old, the daughter of a police constable, and she died on 2 September, the day Mrs Eley died on her hill. Her washing had been emptied into a cesspool three feet from the well. The brickwork of the well was crumbling. The well drew its water from the ground beside the cesspool. Snow died in 1858, aged forty-five, with few followers. The cause of cholera stayed in dispute until Robert Koch isolated the organism in 1883, although the Italian anatomist Filippo Pacini had described it in 1854 to no effect. Farr himself held out until 1866, when a fresh epidemic in the east of London showed high mortality among those supplied from a single reservoir, and then he accepted the explanation. It took twelve years and a second outbreak for the statistician of the General Register Office to exchange one map for another. As for the pump, it has had a livelier afterlife. A replica stands at the corner of Broadwick and Poland Streets, put back in its proper place in 2018 and, as the John Snow Society says, appropriately without a handle. A granite kerbstone marks the exact spot, and the pub beside it carries Snow’s name, which seems to me the right memorial for a case that turned on what people drank. The Society ends its Pumphandle Lecture by having the guest speaker ceremonially remove the pump handle, and then retires to the pub. Silicon Valley Bank failed on 10 March 2023, and Signature Bank followed within days. First Republic, another California lender, served much the same clients with much the same uninsured deposits, and its shares fell by more than 60 per cent on the Monday, although its balance sheet differed from the failed bank’s. Eleven of the largest banks put 30 billion dollars of deposits into it as a show of confidence, a considerable sum to spend on looking calm, and by the end of the month it had still lost about 40 per cent of the 176 billion it held at the turn of the year. Its depositors had drawn their own map from the street, and on that map First Republic stood next to the pump. Banks that look alike from a distance, in size, in sector or in the press, are treated as if they shared a well. A regulator who spends the weekend explaining the differences is addressing people who have already read the spot map. Whitehead, who set out to prove Snow wrong, had to knock on door after door before the neighbourhood he thought he knew showed him the cesspool. A depositor has a Monday morning. Mrs Eley’s sons sent the pump up the hill to her, and the air of Hampstead, so much admired by the physicians of London, had no say in the matter. * * * --- © 2026 Elveander Welfendorff. Quotation with attribution and a link to the source is welcome.