HENRY WHITEHEAD AND CHOLERA IN BROAD STREET

Abstract

THE cholera epidemic in the St. James's district of Westminster in 1854 was perhaps the most terrible outbreak of that disease which this country has ever known-terrible because of its virulence and local concentration.More than five hundred people who lived or worked within an area only a few hundred yards square died of the disease in ten days.The outbreak is memorable, too, in the annals of epidemiology because of its association with John Snow's historic investigation into the Broad Street pump.Less well known, however, is the important contribution made by the Rev. Henry Whitehead, but it was, in fact, his work which constituted the first independent confirmation of Snow's hypothesis attributing the spread of cholera to contaminated water.At the time of the epidemic, Whitehead, then aged twenty-nine, was serving his first curacy at St. Luke's, Berwick Street, the parish which included Broad Street and its environs.Throughout the dreadful days which followed the explosion of the outbreak on i September, the young curate worked incessantly to bring help and comfort to the afflicted and bereaved.John Snow was busily engaged too, but in another way.His home in Sackville Street, Piccadilly, was little more than ten minutes walking distance from Berwick Street.Although he was already conducting an investigation into cholera in South London, he hastened to the scene of this new outburst.Having surveyed the local circumstances, his suspicions fell upon the 'much-frequented' pump in Broad Street.'It appeared to him 'that there was no other circumstance or agent common to the circumscribed locality in which the sudden increase of cholera occurred'.He obtained the addresses ofthe eighty-nine fatal cases which occurred at the onset of the epidemic from the General Register Office and made detailed inquiries into each one.He reported, 'I found that nearly all the deaths had taken place within a short distance of the pump', and, further, he was able to establish that at least sixty-nine of these people had drunk water from it.On the evening of 7 September he put forward his views to a committee of the Board of Guardians, and although they were quite incredulous they ordered the pump-handle to be removed on the following morning.The epidemic steadily declined, and when, by mid-September, the yellow flags which had given warning of the pestilence were removed from the streets, a newspaper correspondent entered the area and gave the following description of the aftermath of the visitation:2 92

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 16 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.