The Great Trouble: A Mystery of London, the Blue Death, and a Boy Called Eel by Deborah Hopkinson (review)

As an orphan in 1854 London, Eel is cautiously content with his present circumstances. He has work as a messenger at a brewery, and he supplements his scant income by sweeping up for a tailor and cleaning animal cages for Dr. Snow, who experiments on them with that new-fangled anesthetic, chloroform. Since he has a place to sleep, enough to eat, and just enough coin to keep his younger brother Henry in school, his only real worry is being found by his larcenous stepfather, who wants to put his stepsons to work as burglars. Widespread tragedy puts Eel’s own issues into perspective, though, when cholera breaks out near the brewery, and he persuades Dr. Snow to redirect his medical attention to easing the plight of Eel’s neighbors. There’s nothing that Snow can do for individual sufferers, but with Eel’s assistance, he makes a careful survey of the area and musters enough evidence to convince the town fathers that tainted water rather than “miasma” is behind the outbreak and disabling the local water pump is the best strategy for disease control. Hopkinson crafts Eel’s storyline to lure readers into the real-life drama of the London cholera outbreak that earned Dr. John Snow credit as a public health pioneer. The fictional and informational threads often vie awkwardly for attention, though, and it’s likely that readers who avidly follow one line will become a bit impatient with the other. However, fictionalized accounts of historic epidemics (e.g., Anderson’s Fever 1793, BCCB 10/00) have a robust following, and kids who want to know more about Dr. Snow and his innovative investigation will garner enough background to try Steven Johnson’s accessible adult work The Ghost Map.