leafy Hampstead. But she still preferred the water from the pump in
town. She thought it tasted better.
One August day in 1854, Eley’s niece visited her from the
neighbouring borough of Islington. Within a week, they would both be
dead. The culprit was cholera, an aggressive disease that causes
diarrhea and vomiting. Left untreated, up to half of people with severe
symptoms will die. The same day that Eley died from cholera, there
were 127 other deaths from the disease, most of them in Soho. By
the end of September, the outbreak would have claimed over six
hundred lives in London. In this era before Koch’s work on germ
theory, the biology of cholera was still a mystery. ‘We know nothing;
we are at sea in a whirlpool of conjecture,’ wrote Thomas Wakley,
founder of The Lancet medical journal, the year before the outbreak
started. People were starting to realise that diseases like smallpox
and measles were contagious, somehow spreading from person to
person, but cholera seemed to be something else. Most believed the
‘miasma theory’, which said that cholera spread through bad smells in
the air.[4]
But not John Snow. Originally from Newcastle, Snow had
investigated his first cholera outbreak in 1831 as an eighteen-year-old
medical apprentice. Even then, he’d noticed some odd patterns.
People who should have been at risk from bad air weren’t getting ill,
and people who supposedly weren’t at risk were. Snow eventually
moved to London, building up a reputation as a talented anaesthetist,
with Queen Victoria among his patients. However, when a cholera
outbreak hit the city in 1848, he revived his old investigations. Who
was catching the disease? When were they getting ill? What linked
the cases? The following year, Snow published an article with a new
theory: the disease spread from one person to another through
contaminated water. The realisation had finally come when he noticed
that patients would often share the same water company. It was a
remarkable insight, not least because Snow had no idea it was
actually microscopic bacteria that were casting cholera’s enormous
shadow.
The 1854 Soho outbreak would prove a good match for Snow’s
theory. There were the workers at the local brewery, with their diet of