page thirty-eight

The Pump

Thirty-seven rooms have dug, bred, assayed and forecast, and nobody in any of them has ever been ill. Today's number lays out a crowded parish in a cholera year, lets something into the well under one of its street pumps, and gives you a few days to work out which.

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a pump a house one bar for each death in it called at

At the corner

Notebook

The returns, day by day

Deaths registered each day of the outbreak. A line marks each evening a handle came off: green for the right pump, amber for the wrong one.

The dead by walk

Every house counted under the pump nearest to it on foot, not as the crow flies.

Parish
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The arrow keys walk to other days. Every day is a different parish, a different set of pumps and a different bad well.

What is real here and what is not

The method is John Snow's, from Soho in 1854. The parish, its streets, its pumps and its dead are the day's number.

  1. 01

    Broad Street

    Cholera broke out around the Broad Street pump on 31 August 1854 and killed more than five hundred people within ten days. Snow, a physician who already held that the disease travelled in water rather than bad air, took the registrar's list of deaths, went door to door asking where people drew their water, and put it to the Board of Guardians of St James's on the evening of 7 September. The handle came off the next day.

  2. 02

    The places that did not fit

    The Lion Brewery on Broad Street lost none of its seventy-odd workers: they drank beer and the brewery had its own well. The Poland Street workhouse, with over five hundred inmates, lost only a handful; it had its own well too. And a widow in Hampstead, miles away, died of it: she had liked the Broad Street water so much that a cart brought her a bottle every day. Her niece, visiting, drank it as well.

  3. 03

    Walking distance

    For the parish inquiry the next year Snow drew a dotted line round the Broad Street pump joining the points that were equally far, on foot through the actual streets, from it and from the next nearest pump. Nearly all the deaths fell inside it. The curate Henry Whitehead, who set out to disprove him, found the first case: a baby at 40 Broad Street, whose nappies had been rinsed into a cesspool three feet from the well.

  4. 04

    Too late, and not the point

    By the time the handle came off the outbreak was already falling, partly because so many people had fled. The page is honest about that: deaths already on their way still come. What the handle proved was the mechanism. The microscopes of the day could not see the organism; Filippo Pacini described it that same year and Robert Koch isolated it in 1884. Here every household is one kind of person, nobody flees and nothing else is in the water.

Thirty-eight rooms, and one number doing all the work. Today it lays out a parish, poisons one well in it and waits to see how quickly you can get a Board of sceptics to take a handle off.