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Reviewed by:
  • The Strange Case of the Broad Street Pump: John Snow and the Mystery of Cholera
  • John M. Eyler, Ph.D.
Sandra Hempel. The Strange Case of the Broad Street Pump: John Snow and the Mystery of Cholera. Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2007. xii, 321 pp., illus. $24.95.

John Snow’s cholera investigations are familiar territory to most historians of medicine and science and to many health science professionals. There certainly is no shortage of books, articles, and commemorative chapters or book introductions on Snow, beginning with those of Snow’s contemporary, Benjamin Ward Richardson. Since 1995 there have been at least three other books devoted to Snow and his career: David A. E. Shepard, John Snow: Anaesthetist to a Queen and Epidemiologist to a Nation – A Biography (Chapel Hill, NC: Professional Press, 1995); Peter Vinten Johansen et al., Cholera, Chloroform, and the Science of Medicine: A Life of John Snow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); and Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World (New York: Riverhead Books, 2006).

Sandra Hempel’s book originally appeared from an English trade publisher under the title The Medical Detective: John Snow and the Mystery of Cholera (London: Granta, 2006). Despite its appearance in the United States from a University Press, it is really a popular history, having no pretensions to scholarly innovation. In her bibliographical essay (293) Hempel makes a revealing admission. As she was finishing her project on Snow, she learned that Vinten-Johansen and colleagues were also completing an “academic biography” of Snow. Until she had finished her own book, she avoided reading this new volume, she tells us, “because I didn’t [End Page 525] want to be influenced by them or tempted into taking shortcuts with my research.” In keeping with this spirit of isolation throughout her book, she avoids confronting the arguments or interpretations of other scholars, and she does not trouble her readers, or her publisher, with footnotes, although the book has a brief bibliographical essay and a list of major sources, mainly primary sources, for each chapter.

Granted, then, that this book is not intended for scholars, it must also be said that it is nonetheless informed and informative. Hempel has clearly read the major relevant primary sources and much of the secondary literature, and she has produced an engaging account of Snow’s life and cholera investigations. Her reconstruction of the cholera outbreak in Soho in August and September 1854 makes particularly lively reading, and this is the part of her text that general readers will probably find most memorable. In this reviewer’s opinion, however, the most successful part of the book is her account of the cholera investigations of Snow’s successors during the outbreak in East London in 1866. This is an outbreak that has not received as much attention from scholars as the outbreaks of 1849 and 1854, even though the results of the investigations of the 1866 outbreak were instrumental in winning support for Snow’s water-borne theory of cholera transmission.

The book’s major limitations lie in what it avoids doing. Readability has sometimes been achieved by avoiding complications. The reader is left almost entirely to imagine why Snow’s contemporaries were not convinced by his evidence and arguments, particularly the evidence Snow gathered in South London in 1854. Greater contextualization of his theories and methods certainly would have been helpful. Hempel points out that in his second edition of On the Mode of Communication of Cholera (London: John Churchill, 1855) Snow included among the diseases he believed were communicated by contaminated drinking water, malaria, yellow fever, and plague, but she excuses this error as an “afterthought,” rather than exploring what it shows us about Snow’s method of reasoning by analogy. Here and elsewhere some opportunities for a more analytical approach were lost.

The best current book-length account of Snow’s research is Cholera, Chloroform, and the Science of Medicine by Peter Vinten-Johansen and his colleagues at Michigan State University. But for the general reader The Strange Case of the Broad Street Pump...

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