Detail of John Snow's famous map showing the cholera outbreak centred on the Broad Street pump.
Between 1831 and 1854, tens of thousands of English people died of cholera. British anaesthetist John Snow suspected the mass epidemic to be a water-borne disease caused by sewage being dumped in cesspools near town wells.
But Snow struggled to convince the authorities to take action. The medical establishment were so wedded to their theory that disease was caused by breathing ‘vapours’ or ‘miasma’ that they ignored the extensive evidence implicating one pump in particular.
