Oddlet: John Snow · 1 min read
Nov 8, 2026
A Bottle for Hampstead
In September 1854, the only cholera death in Hampstead was a widow whose favourite drinking water was carted daily from a pump on Broad Street.
John Snow was a physician, a teetotaller, and the man who in September 1854 walked to a public pump on Broad Street and had the handle unbolted. Cholera was ripping through Soho. He had gone door to door, plotted the deaths on a map, and found them clustered around the pump like iron filings.
The water was the neighbourhood's pride. Locals said it was the coldest and best-tasting in Soho, faintly effervescent. The tang, which the neighbourhood took for character, was decomposing sewage from a leaking cesspool three feet from the well.
One admirer lived in Hampstead. Susannah Eley, a widow, had loved the water so much in her Soho years that she had a bottle carted up to Hampstead every day. Her last delivery arrived on 31 August, the day the outbreak began. She drank it and died on 2 September, the only cholera death in Hampstead. Her niece was visiting from Islington. She drank some and died too.
Snow wrote them in. Two deaths miles from the pump, joined to it by a bottle.
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- Wikipedia — John Snow — Comprehensive biographical overview: birth (15 March 1813, York), education (Hunterian School, London MD 1844), teetotalism/vegetarianism, publications, chloroform work with Queen Victoria in 1853 and 1857, death 16 June 1858.
- Wikipedia — 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak — Death toll (~616 total; 127 in first three days, 500+ by 10 September), pump handle removal on 8 September 1854, Board of Guardians meeting, Henry Whitehead's role, index case identification.
- Wikipedia — Henry Whitehead (priest) — Whitehead's biography (1825–1896), his position as assistant curate of St Luke's, Berwick Street, his conversion from miasma theory to Snow's waterborne hypothesis, and identification of 'Baby Lewis' at 40 Broad Street.
- London Museum — John Snow: Cholera and the Broad Street Pump — Museum overview of the outbreak beginning 31 August 1854, mapping method, address (Broad Street, now Broadwick Street), and the leaking sewer as contamination source.
- UCLA Fielding School of Public Health — John Snow's life — Scholarly UCLA epidemiology site with career chronology, 125 publications figure, founding of Epidemiological Society 1850, presidency of Medical Society of London 1855, chloroform to Queen Victoria dates.
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