CHAPTER ELEVEN

Haxby, Yorkshire, August 1854

Snow stared through the glass out at the green oaks twisting in the wind. Rain ran off their trunks and poured into moats at their bases. It was chilly enough here in Yorkshire that his father had a fire in the grate. He wished the North Country summer weather could be packaged and sent to London, where the thermometer had stood at ninety degrees two days ago.

His father snored in his chair by the fire. For all his urgency in summoning Snow here from London in the middle of the cholera epidemic, he seemed to have little to say. Snow found himself resenting the miserable eight-hour train ride that had filled his Friday, and would now take up his entire Monday. Four days of research wasted for his fathers false sentimentality.

Duncan Snow stirred himself and irritably grabbed at the plaid blanket around his legs. "Damn thing never stays on. Cold as a vault in this room."

John Snow went over to the already blazing fire and poked at

"Stop that!" barked the old man. "You'll only make it worse."

Snow returned to his chair, then picked up his Times and tried to finish the article he'd been reading.

The Times Bombay correspondent reports that the severe epidemic of Asiatic Cholera which broke outlast January in southern India has not abated. Over ten thousand natives are presumed to have died so far.

For all Snows absorption with cholera in London, he had thought very little about its source. It seemed probable that a boat from India must have brought the first case.

"Since you won't talk to me, Johns you might as well tell me what you are reading."

Snow answered with his head still buried in the paper. "A reference to the cholera epidemic in India. Rather severe. Thousands have died so far."

"From what I hear, cholera is a just punishment for their sins. All those black heathen souls. As they sow so shall they reap.

Snow felt an urge to debate and at the same time a silencing shame that he, too, had once almost become as self-righteous about religion. His voice betrayed more irritation than he wished.

"Father, that area of India has a large Christian population. Indians there were converted by the Portuguese before 1600. And besides, white people died too. The governor of one of the smaller provinces. Listen to this." Snow read out loud.

This is the same epidemic that in its early stages in January carried away Her Majesty's governor of the province, Colonel Augustus Aynsworth, along with his stepson, Mr. Henry Bince. The governor's wife and daughter survived the scourge. As the contagious aspects of this dreadful disease are not yet agreed upon, Sir Philip Constable, the Deputy Minister of Public Health, advises that all cargo entering any British port from that part of the world should be treated with caution.

"I suppose you cant accuse a colonial governor of pagan idolatry.

"Who knows, boy, with the way the upper classes live these days. The man could have fallen into some foreign temptation."

He brushed the blanket on his lap with impatience, as if dusting off contagion from tropical immorality, worse than any plague. "I suppose there's no chance the disease will come here, to England?"

"Don't you realize that it's already in London? That thousands are dying? And hasn't anything of what I've told you about my work sunk in?"

His father look away, apathetic, and stared at the fields beyond the wet oaks. He obviously cared as little about Snow's medical search as Snow did for breeds of dairy cattle, or weights of flax seed. Then he turned back to his son. "John, why can't you see reason and give up this fool practice of medicine? We could get the farm going again, the way it was meant to be. The south meadow could be drained next spring .

Snow sighed in exasperation. "Is this what you summoned me up here for? I should have known. I've told you a hundred times before, I would fail at farming. My heart's not in it. You'd do better to hire some young man from the area. Leave the place to him in your will, if you like. I won't mind."

"But John, its not too late. You can still get out of that practice in London. You know you'd like to."

"Can't you understand? Medicine is my profession now. Its not as though I'm a failure at it, either." Snow paused and pulled at a loose thread in his waistcoat. "I don't think you realize. People come to my lectures. I've sent you the articles I've published. And that medical society that I wrote you about, I'm their orator now."

"Orator? Don't try to impress me with fancy titles. What is it?"

"I make speeches. But never mind, its not important. The main thing, as far as you're concerned, is that the practice is more profitable every year.

"What rubbish! As if the pennies you bring in from that consulting room could ever equal the income of a prosperous farm."

"Seven hundred pounds last year, Father. From the anesthesia."

The old man raised his brows and went on. "But it's not respectable. The idea, you with your hands all over those sick people. Just anybody." The old man blew the breath from his mouth in exasperation. "And another thing. This anesthesia, you call it. Its against everything in the Bible. Pain was created for a reason, boy. To go against it is a devilish thing."

"A devilish thing? Would you have said that when Mother was dying in labor, screaming in agony with the dead child still inside her? You thought I didn't understand at that age, but believe me, even then, I couldn't fathom how God would let such a thing happen." Snow saw the grief pass over his fathers face but he refused to relent. He had to make his point even if it were for the last time. "Who knows if Mother might not still be with us if someone could have helped her with the kind of surgery we do now?"

"No moral family would submit to such a thing," muttered his father.

"You seem to forget that I assisted at Her Majesty's lying-in when Prince Leopold was born last spring. She asked for the chloroform herself. Or are you just irritated because I made you swear not to discuss it with anyone? You lost your bit of village gossip, didn't you?"

"The queen, God bless her, should have shown a better example."

Snow opened his mouth for a rational answer, but all he said was, "We won't talk about it, Father. We can't agree." He stalked out of the room, heading into the hallway and out the front door, slamming it behind him.

The rain had stopped. Snow walked ahead, unseeing. Every time he came to visit it was the same; there would be a few hours or days of bland talk about nothing, and then the two of them would explode in anger at each other. Each incident felt worse than the one before it, and every time he swore he wouldn't let it happen again.

Snow decided to walk off his anger. A cold wet wind whipped cow smells from the barn while he crossed over a field of summer cabbages, saturating his shoes with mud and manure. Once he reached the only road, he began to walk quickly and soon found himself at the Norman church tower with its adjoining cemetery.

He thought he would look at his mothers grave. He hadn't seen it for a year now.

Snow opened the lich-gate of the churchyard and passed through a gap in the mossy stone walls. Immediately the wind died down, kept out by a border of pines and the church wall.

In the new quiet a mild bird song came from the hedges. He picked his way over the graveled paths and sodden leaves to the graves of his mother and infant sister.

Although his mother had died when he was eight, these stones still looked new compared to the surrounding ones, many of which dated from over two hundred years before.

Snow tried to pray, as he always tried when he came here, but he hardly knew what to pray for. Surely his mother's soul was safely lifted to heaven by now? And if not, what could his feeble pleas do to change it? His mind routinely went through an "Our Father" and an inane rhyme about Jesus he'd learned as a child. He was thinking that he'd stayed long enough when a shabby gentleman approached him from the main path.

His receding chin and bald head gave him the look of a turtle, and he spoke so softly that Snow had to bend to hear him.

"Excuse me, my good man," he said. "Would it disturb you if I were to take some notes from this stone? A departed spouse?" He looked at Snow with sympathy. "You see, I'm collecting historical information for the County Record Society, and its important to keep track of locations in the churchyard."

As explanation he held out a simple map of the graveyard, with boxes drawn for each grave, filled in with names and dates. "Some of the names have quite worn away on the stones, you see, and I had to go through the parish records. But this one here is still sharp. Good Oxford stonework." He ran an appreciative finger over the precisely cut letters of the Snow family memorial.

"Of course," answered Snow, "please go ahead." Snow took the proffered map. It held for him a macabre fascination. All those deaths! The names of his ancestors and his neighbors forebears showed in a spidery handwriting. What had they all died of?

How much more engrossing it would have been if each coffin-shaped box included that fact; ague, dropsy, smallpox, scarlet fever, and on the seventeenth-century stones the many bubonic plague deaths. Those details were lost. Anyone was lucky if after all these generations even their names remained.

He handed the map back and watched while the man carefully transcribed the details from the Snow tomb into the empty box on his map. Snow was so lost in his vision of a map of diseases that he almost shook the man by the shoulder and said of his mother, "Uterine rupture. She died in childbirth in terrible pain. And the infant died before it ever saw light, before it could breathe, before it could cry." But instead he simply accepted the researchers thanks.

Early the next morning he took the train back to London.

John Snow's mother died in 1860, outliving John Snow by two years and her husband by 14 years.    For more information on John Snow's family, click here.

John Snow provided chloroform to Queen Victoria on two occasions: the birth of Prince Leopold in 1853 and the birth of Princess Beatrice in 1857.