The Strange Case of the Broad Street Pump: John Snow and the Mystery of Cholera (review)

Although published by an academic press, The Strange Case of the Broad Street Pump is not a work of scholarship. Written by a health journalist, it is an attempt at "educated" popular history. It features a breathless journalistic style that reads uncomfortably for those who are more accustomed to sober scholarly prose. As the author confides, she wanted a big story "that would combine science with colour and human interest . . . a strong narrative and a clearly defined tale with a beginning, a middle and an end—with twists and turns and cliff-hangers and finally a satisfying conclusion" (283).

Science, color, and human interest may constitute an interdisciplinary approach, and the book does, arguably, combine science, social history, and would-be thriller fiction. The result is an imaginative reconstruction of historical situations, as in "the temperature climbed remorselessly to 98.5, and as the hours dragged by everyone was longing for nightfall" (177). As history, however, it is not satisfactory for professional practitioners, however much it may appeal to fans of mystery fiction. In keeping with the popular genre, the author restricts bibliographical information almost entirely to the obvious secondary sources; any primary sources that the text incorporates go without reference. As a contribution to scholarship, this book has dubious credentials, not helped by its erroneous statement on the second page that three great pandemics of cholera took place in the nineteenth century; the authorities on the subject recognize five, if not six (the last beginning in 1899).¹

Hempel's narrative begins with a discussion of cholera's nature, its journey out of India, and its arrival in England in 1831. Then follows a couple of chapters on the life of John Snow, the London practitioner who first made the connection between cholera and contaminated water supplies, and a digression into the "Shameful Affair" of the cholera outbreak in Drouet's Pauper Asylum for Children, before a return to Snow's investigations into the causes of the disease. As the story meanders through nineteenth-century disease theories and the shameful neglect of Snow's work, a sense of déjà vu might intrude. The text has much in common with the unacknowledged-heroic-genius school of biography, which modern biographers, as much as historians, have worked steadily to displace in favor of more balanced, historically sensitive evaluations. A far more rigorous interdisciplinary biographical account is to be found in the magisterial multi-authored volume by Vinten-Johansen et al. in 2003, which manages to combine biography, social history, and the history of science and medicine in an elegantly written and structured analysis that examines both Snow the man and the originality of his contributions to medical science.² Meticulous in its reconstruction of Snow's experimental techniques—for example, in respect of both cholera and inhalation chloroform—the Vinten-Johansen volume, in extreme contrast to Hempel's, is intensely exciting in its lucid exposition and masterly control over the diverse disciplinary elements that Snow's life and career involved.