CORONAVIRUS (COVID-19) RESOURCE CENTER Read More
Add To Favorites

This Week in History: Water safety and the 1832 cholera epidemic

Lake County News - 6/25/2017

A public safety poster posted in New York City during the cholera outbreak in 1832. Public domain image.

This week in history, the focus is on water and the devastating cholera outbreak that hit New York City beginning on June 29, 1832.

Water, water everywhere

Like good health, modern conveniences are usually only appreciated following a catastrophic meltdown ? somewhere in the void left by their absence we stop taking them for granted.

Take clean water. Prior to Flint, Michigan, the topic of municipal water supply garnered about as much media attention as Native American land rights (another one of those topics that easily fade into the background of national interest until, for instance, an oil company wants to build a new pipeline through a reservation).

And yet, our very ability to roll out of bed, walk to the faucet and expect clean, potable water to issue forth for our personal consumption is a spectacular luxury, not just in the context of the modern world but in all of human history.

Even the ancient Romans, with their great aqueduct systems, were only able to supply private water to the very wealthy. The rest of the unwashed masses had to share wells.

The history of our democratized modern water system only stretches back to around the time of our Civil War. Like most largescale public initiatives undertaken in this country, it took a disaster to galvanize us into action.

Death stalks New York City

The disaster in this case was cholera and on this day in 1832 New York City nearly broke under our nation's first outbreak of the disease.

Transmitted through contaminated water and food, cholera played hell in the close-packed tenements of Gotham.

Like most diseases, the cholera outbreak of 1832 targeted the poor, who lived in the kind of conditions where the disease flourished.

Also like modern diseases (I'm thinking of the AIDS crisis of the 1980s), those most susceptible to the disease were themselves blamed for its spread.

You see, back then the best of medical professionals still believed that diseases spread through noxious vapors in the air. If the poor would only clean up after themselves, the argument went, these diseases wouldn't wreak such havoc.

Five Points, a neighborhood cobbled together by the flood of Irish immigrants, was especially vulnerable. Charles Dickens once remarked about Five Points that "all that is loathsome, drooping and decayed is here." Now cholera had come calling. The neighborhood was decimated.

The city did not know how to respond to the hundreds of victims flooding into the private hospitals ? the only health care facilities available at the time. In short order, every available cot contained a dying patient bent double from pain.

The first signs of the disease were diarrhea, followed by cramps, and fever. As the circulatory system failed, shock set in and death stalked around the corner.

It didn't take long for those able, to flee the loathsome stench of the plagued city. The streets out of New York were soon clogged with finely-crafted carriages and their terrified, well-dressed cargo.

Following several weeks of misery the disease petered out. In a city of a quarter million, more than 3,500 people succumbed to the disease, a ratio of victims that in today's population of New York City would exceed 100,000.

An 1827 Painting by George Catlin of the chaotic Five Points intersection in New York City. The refuse, swarms of people and cramped conditions in this part of the city made it an ideal target for diseases. Public domain image.

The slow dawning of insight

Following the cholera outbreak, steps were taken to clean up the city and get rid of the imaginary vapors that had supposedly carried the disease.

While more sanitation had the salutary effect of better smelling streets, it didn't solve the underlining problem of cholera and other, water and food-transmitted diseases like dysentery.

The solution finally came, oddly enough, in the form of a dirty diaper and a curious physician on a mission.

Dr. John Snow, an obstetrician in London, had long suspected a link between cholera and contaminated water but his fellow doctors were hearing none of it.

His 1849 paper outlining his theory was met with criticism on both sides of the pond. Cholera, and indeed most diseases, were clearly transmitted through "miasmas in the air," not water!

When an outbreak of the disease swept through Soho in London in 1854, Dr. Snow went to work. After days of interviewing victims, he discovered that a high concentration of victims (some 500) lived within 250 yards of a popular water pump at the corner of Cambridge and Broad Streets.

After identifying restaurants and schools where many victims apparently contracted the disease, Dr. Snow further discovered that the common denominator in all cases was the Broad Street water pump.

The only other victim who hadn't contracted cholera from the water pump was patient zero: an infant whose mother washed his diapers at the very same water pump, thus sparking what Dr. Snow called "the most terrible outbreak of cholera which ever occurred in this kingdom."

Dr. Snow finally convinced the town's officials to close the water pump. But even when the number of cases declined following the pump's closure, health officials still didn't believe Dr. Snow's theory.

It wasn't until 1883 when a German Physician named Robert Koch isolated the bacterium "Vibrio cholerae" that Dr. Snow was vindicated.

For the next several decades, cities the world over took the first steps to ensure clean drinking water to prevent similar outbreaks like the 1832 New York one and the 1854 Soho one.

If Flint is any indication, it's still an ongoing process.

Antone Pierucci is the former curator of the Lake County Museum in Lake County, Calif., and a freelance writer whose work has been featured in such magazines as Archaeology and Wild West as well as regional California newspapers.

An 1849 cartoon poking fun at the boy's apparent problem separating cause and effect of cholera. Little did the cartoonist know that the boy was spot on ? the water pipe the man is shown turning on did indeed "turn on the cholera." Public domain image.