CHAPTER SIX

London, July 1854

When Snow reached home, he was so exhausted that he didn't even wash. He collapsed in an armchair and stared fixedly at the curving glass tubes of his laboratory equipment. Even the effort of moving his eyes seemed too great. The hedgehogs in their cages rustled nervously. One of them started to run on its wheel.

He made a mental note to have the red leather cover of the chair wiped down with carbolic acid in case any contamination had stuck to his clothes. He tried to think of his data, but his mind didn't go forward. His thoughts revolved on the combination of carbolic and red leather; what would the carbolic do to the leather, get up and wash, what would the carbolic do to his skin. Then he woke from his doze with a start.

An ugly shrieking came from the colony of starlings in the ivy on the front of the house. No epidemic could affect their routine, and their lives would be unchanged if all London died of this plague.

A vague picture rose before him, like a child's drawing, of a gravestone and flowers, with himself dead of cholera. His work would be unfinished but his mind finally at rest; the street abandoned, and the starlings still jammering away sunset after sunset.  With relief, he felt his detachment return, and with it his ability to shut out any response to the cholera cases. They were sources of information for him, nothing more.

But a new anxiety crept in, and he realized that what he'd been smelling for some minutes was not his own house' s signature but the odor of the slum with the prostitute, and those stairs on the way out. Was it on his shoes? He forced himself to his feet and tugged off his boots.

In the bedroom, he stripped off his damp clothes and washed in cold water. Already the abuse of the past weeks showed. Sleepless nights had made rusty patches under his eyes and his beard couldn't hide the skin flaking around one corner of his mouth. New wrinkles marked his high forehead and his hair seemed even grayer. Was his bald spot really bigger? A bruise from a forgotten collision with furniture or a doorway showed on his forearm.

Click here to see two images of John Snow

He put on his home uniform, an old smoking jacket he'd bought second-hand his first year at medical school. It still held an aura of that initial taste of freedom, away from home and his father's rigid rules. Twenty years had added to his waistline and tonight Snow didn't even try to button the jacket.

Already more comfortable and protected from feeling in its worn velvet, he returned to the front room. His housekeeper, Mrs. Jarrett, was in there, leaning over a tea tray crammed with small cakes and dry biscuits. She'd pushed aside a jumble of chemistry apparatus to set the tray on the table. He didn't realize until then how hungry he was. She was already in the midst of a rambling sentence which must have begun the moment she heard him leave the bedroom.

"-- no more cinnamon anywhere, it's just not to be had, so I couldn't do those biscuits you like so much, even though it is baking day and I thought I'd go ahead despite all this heat. So terribly sorry, but I had to do pork pies instead, thought the butter for the pastry looked bad. From Brand's shop you see, it was all we could get."

It was all addressed to the tray; she never looked at his face. With her left hand she held out a plate and she poured his tea with her right.

He took a pie and went to the window. Munching the greasy pastry (she was right about the butter; a faintly rancid taste lingered behind his teeth), he looked down into the dark street. Few people were visible and half the houses had no lights at all. Their owners must have left town. It was just a matter of time before the looting would start.

How differently the street had looked a month ago! This was an easy route through Soho and the foot and horse traffic had always been abundant. Housemaids would steal a chat on their employers' front stairs. Cabs waited at all hours.

Snow remembered the night he'd stood at the window four weeks ago, after coming home from seeing his first cholera case in five years.

Mrs. Jarrett had been busy then, as now, setting out the tea as if he were some duke waiting to be fed. And he had tried to warn her of what would happen.

"There was a cholera case today, Mrs. Jarrett." He'd waited for some response but she had continued to fuss over the tray. He went on. "Not far from here, actually. Broad Street."

She still didn't answer, but tightened her mouth into deeper than usual lines of disapproval. As if he'd mentioned sex, or toilets.

"There will be more. You may want to consider going down to Yorkshire for part of the summer."

"What, pick up and change house for a few upset stomachs? I'm sure you'll find that it's just some summer flux, like Mrs. Grant had two houses down. Too many peaches, it was. Two days of misery and she was right again. That's the trouble with all this summer fruit."

She shifted to a mechanical dusting of Snow's books and kept talking under her breath.

"Cholera, I'm sure." As if he'd seen cholera. These striplings don't know what disease is. Oxford in the thirties, now that was cholera.

Click here for a description of the 1826-37 pandemic of Asiatic cholera, including maps of England.

Snow had to raise his voice to get her attention. "It was most definite. A three-month-old infant died of it this afternoon."  His throat tightened briefly with the memory of the still body of the baby boy, which was large for its age and must have been healthy and thriving until it fell ill. The mother had been crying so hard she couldn't answer his probing questions.

She stopped dusting for a moment. "Poor mite. Probably fed off one of those new bottle and tube contraptions, mother too sluttish to do her duty right. I know how they live over on Broad Street. If it was fed at all. That's the trouble with girls, they go off and -- well, there's justice, that's all I can say."

She started to straighten papers on his desk, which he'd repeatedly asked her not to do, but this didn't seem a good moment to stop her. "All that fruit," she went on."Unhealthy stuff. It's peaches now, and green grapes --"

"Whatever you choose to think, be sure you boil all the water for cooking --"

"in all the stalls. Fruit. Everyone will be sick, you'll see. We'd better put an extra chair in your consulting room, you'll be busy with it, I can tell. No restraint with these people, that's the problem."

"and even washing." Snow noticed his voice rising and felt like a fool. He still hadn't tasted his tea. He wanted to throw the cup at her. "This water was fully boiled,I assume?"

"What? Me serve you tea made with tepid water? Of course it was boiled. The idea! You needn't tell me how to run my kitchen."

With a disgusted look at the three cages of hedgehogs, she had left the room, which was still in a mess. All her fussing never did seem to clean it.

And now, weeks into the epidemic, she behaved no differently. Snow knew she admitted to the existence of the disease, forced by the death of Lady Sowerby's groom next door. But even when he told her this she'd sniffed and reminded him of the groom's drinking habits. Struck down by God, she'd pronounced. When Lady Sowerby herself died the next day Mrs. Jarrett said nothing.

As she left the room, Snow finished the last bite of the pork pie then downed a few cups of black Darjeeling. No milk for the tea; there hadn't been for days, and he missed it. Yesterday Mrs. Jarrett managed to get a bucketful. Even after boiling it tasted so sour that Snow refused to touch it and ordered her to throw out the whole lot.

He went over to the laboratory bucket and peered in; the dead squirrel was gone, of course, or he would have smelled it the moment he had entered the room.

The front bell rang. Snow hastily wiped pie grease from his fingers and pulled a stack of notebooks from his bag by the desk. He was leafing through the day's notes when his friend Caleb Beersdon walked in, unannounced.

Dropping his small bony body into the chair next to Snow's, Caleb pulled some papers from his jacket. Sweat blotched his white shirt where it wasn't already marked by printer's ink.

"Sorry I'm late."

"Quite all right. I'm late myself. Stopped in Golden Square. There'd been a murder."  He thought briefly of telling Caleb about the letter that morning and the sandy dead squirrel, then decided against it. He didn't want his friends to start thinking he was imagining things.

"That fellow in the pit?"

"What, you knew already?"

"About an hour ago. I couldn't get out of the newspaper office until seven so I was there when the messenger came. You should find a better neighborhood to walk through."  He paused for a moment. "I have to get back sooner than I'd planned. Deborah's out of sorts from the heat."

An image rose to Snow's mind of Deborah Beersdon, red nosed and steely as a scalpel. When was she ever in sorts? Since his marriage ten years ago, Caleb seemed not to notice that his narrow shoulders had drooped farther every year, and his posture was more like that of a man twice his age. His hair had thinned much more than Snow's.

Caleb tugged at his mustache now with inky fingers as he glanced over Snow's shoulder. The man twisted, restless as always.

"What's that you're looking at?" he asked Snow.

Snow had come on the drawings of the prostitute's syphilis lesions. He found himself wondering about her. What would her laugh have sounded like? How had she spent her tenth birthday?  As if to find an answer, he held the drawings up to the lamp for examination, and turned one so Caleb could see.

"Horrid stuff," muttered Caleb, turning his face away. He went over to poke a finger into one of the cages.

"Secondary syphilis." Snow glanced at Caleb's back. "Careful. They bite. I wouldn't want to have to give you any painkiller afterwards."

Caleb turned back to Snow and scanned the bottles of drugs on Snow's shelves. "You still don't trust me? It's been eight years since I've touched any opium."

"It's not you, Caleb. A man has so little control over those things. I've seen patients, the most upright of churchgoers, addicted for life after a bad broken leg." Snow cleared his throat.

"Do the drawings bother you? You shouldn't let yourself get so affected." The girl's face came to mind and he tried to dismiss it.

"I've got plenty of numbers for you tonight," he said.

"Your aren't the only one anymore." Caleb turned from the animals. His voice was back to normal. "Farr's collecting deaths for us now. He dropped a list by The Times today." Caleb pulled out more papers.

"He'd been in Southwark [B 4] all day," he went on. "His total is seventy-six. They're all by parish at time of death; no origins given. There are three poor hospitals in Newington parish alone.  It looks like all he did was hop from one to the next and sweep up the figures."

Even though he had longed for help, Snow tried not to show his jealousy, knowing that someone else was on his ground. Not that Farr would have found anything meaningful; he was as narrow-minded a survey worker as you could find.

"God," he said. "How can we figure anything accurately with idiots like Farr out there making notes? We may as well jumble all the cases together. Let's throw in deaths from railway accidents and French duels while we're at it."

Snow took the creased pages from Caleb's hands. "Look at this trash." He proceeded to read aloud. " 'Deaths and Morbidity. London. June.' I like the precision of his title. 'Seventy-six deaths. Addresses unknown. Names unknown. Ages unknown. Half from unknown cause or suspected Asiatic Cholera.' " Snow tossed the pages on the floor.

Caleb didn't pick the papers up. "Farr's launched a new plan, you know. Determined to prove that a miasma of bad air causes cholera; that it isn't actually spread from one person to another."

Snow sat up straight. "What? That old theory of his again? He couldn't make it stick five years ago. How's he going to prove it this time?"

"Some project, I don't know. He was explaining it to me, I didn't really listen. Laboratory analysis of the bottled atmosphere of cholera neighborhoods."

Something dawned on Snow. "And who's paying for all this?"

"Well, I didn't want to tell you, but he was awarded money yesterday by the Board of Health. It was Sir Philip Constable's idea, the Deputy Minister of Public Health. An emergency fund for disasters like cholera and typhus. Five hundred pounds."

"No. For miasma? And through Constable?" Sir Philip Constable, whom Snow scarcely knew, had talked to him, months ago, about a possible nomination for The Royal Surgical Society. He hadn't heard from the man since. Everyone's theory but his was getting attention. "Listen, Beersdon, I know it's carried by water. I just can't prove it yet. All the others, they're on the right track with these miasmas and dust clouds. If I could just get enough figures--"

"Why don't you join in with Farr? He's offered, I know. You could share his project."

Snow turned his head aside, gazing at the wall. A craving for medical companionship, even Farr's, came over him. What a relief it would be, to let out some of the stabs of loss and defeat he'd had that day to another doctor who could understand it. He almost agreed to Caleb's suggestion.

But then he remembered that he would have to share any discoveries as well. "No," he answered. "It's out of the question. That theory's hogwash. And even if I could persuade him to go along with me, I could never adapt to his methods."

"He's good at the money side of it, you know," Caleb persisted. "Able to get backing from big people. And are you so very sure that you're right about your water theory? The chief at the paper thinks that contagion may not be --"

"No amount of money can prove that cholera is spread by air." Snow smiled in mock, patronizing patience. But even as he spoke he wondered how he would ever be able to prove that it was spread by water. He hadn't been able to show anything yet; it was just a theory, like any other.

"All right, all right." Caleb stirred in the hard seat. "If you're so critical, let's see what you've got. I can't stay here all night."

"Wait a moment." On impulse, Snow changed his mind and reached into his pocket, then handed to Caleb the note from that morning. "Tell me what you think of this."

Caleb read it and then started laughing. "What do they think you'll do, stop your life's research so you can avoid damnation?"

He fingered the paper. "It's dirty enough."

"That's from what it was packed with. A dead squirrel, nested in a basket like a prize fillet of pork. But they do concern me, Caleb. You, of all people, should know what religion can do to a man's sense of proportion."  Deborah spent her Saturdays and Sundays at Methodist prayer meetings, dragging Caleb along whenever she could.

Caleb cleared his throat. "If they want to think that cholera's from immorality, fine. What on earth can they really do to you? I wouldn't give it another thought."

"Well. Let's get to work, then." Snow ran his eyes along the list he'd compiled from the workhouses and lodgings that afternoon. He could hardly read his own crabbed writing. "Lodging, 15 Longacre Alley. Fifty-seven cases, twenty-nine deaths.' Here's the list of deaths, first: 'Abel Carter, twenty-eight, unemployed laborer. Cholera, seventeen hours. Miriam Hart, twentyone, basket maker. Cholera, seven hours. Infant Hart, two months. Cholera, three hours. Sam Worth, forty-six, hatter, cholera, twelve hours.' "

"Wait a bit, will you? I can't write that fast." Caleb wiped sweat from his forehead and slowly copied it all down. In his years as an editor he'd lost the fast hand of a Fleet Street reporter.

"Now here's an interesting one," continued Snow. "This woman was still coherent when I reached her, said she'd been in a sick household up north in mid-May but swore she'd had no contact since then, had been out tramping where not a case was to be found. Such a long incubation --"

"Just give me the numbers, Snow. I can't print all this in the paper. Certainly not their names, you should know that."  Caleb pushed damp hair back from his eyes. "Better yet, just hand me the list. I'll copy out what I want."

Snow felt an embarrassing reluctance to let anyone, even Caleb, see his notes. They were the work of so many days on the street and nights at his desk. You never knew these days what people would do, who they talked to. He didn't hand them over.

"All right, I'll slow down and abbreviate it. Sorry. It's so rare that I get a chance to talk about these things. I can hardly expect my housekeeper to be interested."

Caleb didn't seem to notice that Snow had covered the notes with his hand. They hurried through the rest and finished in half an hour.

When they were almost done Caleb interrupted.

"Listen, Snow. This is a bore. I know we have to print it in the Public Health section, but couldn't you give me something spicier? How about a description of the lodging where you found all these cases? Think what a story it would make."

"What? Nobody wants to read about that, any more than you wanted to look at pictures of those lesions."

"No, no, you're wrong. Didn't you read the paper this week? They're doing a series on the trial of an abortionist, who not only committed the act, but overcharged the girl and didn't do it properly. The going rate is only eight pounds. He asked ten.  God knows where she got the money. He botched it and she had the child anyway. A clergyman was the father. It's sensational, but it'll be finished in a day or two. We need new material."

Snow wondered how far the pregnancy had progressed. Did the man use ether, or chloroform? Or did he just tie the girl down and do it cold? Snow had been doing work in anesthesiology for years now, and he knew that the paralyzing effect of the chloroform could have had an interesting effect on curtailing post-abortion bleeding. Of course, if the abortion didn't work, that didn't apply. Whatever tools the abortionist had used with such ineptitude must have scarred the girl's organs terribly. It was amazing that she and the child survived.

Then came a brief and agonizing memory of his mother, bleeding to death in childbirth when Snow was eight. Years later he had asked the ancient local doctor who attended the birth what exactly had gone wrong. "Her womb burst, boy. The child's head was too big to descend. A girl. We had to take the child out with a knife, but it was dead. In among her intestines by then."

Snow by then was no stranger to grim details; he had used chloroform to anesthetize dozens of leg amputations and to ease some terrible, fatal childbirths, but even so he had turned white and had to sit down. "Sorry," the old country doctor continued. "You shouldn't have asked. At least her suffering was short."

Now Snow thought of the exact pain, however short, his mother must have felt when the walls of her uterus burst. And the pain of the girl in the newspaper story, who had gone on to give birth through a canal lacerated by the botched abortion. She probably couldn't afford a doctor in attendance, let alone the relief of chloroform. All Snow said to Caleb was, "What smut. Did you write it?"

"God no. I don't have to do that sort of thing anymore. But I edited some of it. The men who write those things aren't always as discreet we might like. There were details one couldn't put into print. But really, I think it would make a good story if you could tell me where you went today."

"No, no, I don't think so." He felt an unexpected aversion to broadcasting the details of these folks' last hours. Their deaths had been so undignified, so public. Besides, he didn't want Farr and everyone else heading over there tomorrow.

"Why do you go to these places, anyway? You could get the deaths somewhere else less nasty."

"Don't you see? I'm asking them where they drank, what they drank, what they ate. It's pretty much the nasty places, as you put it, where the problems come up. If I can prove that all these cases got their water from the same spot, I'm clear."

Caleb didn't seem to listen to this. He was too heated about his own story. "Can't you at least tell me what the place looked like?"

"Well, it was in a cellar. You had to go down stairs to reach it."

"What neighborhood?"

"Not far from here, actually. North of Seven Dials. I'd rather you didn't give the address, if you're going to print this. And especially don't use my name. Just say 'a doctor.' "

"Cholera's not the best way to attract the Grosvenor Square patients, is it? I can hardly blame you."

"No, that's not it. I just don't want anyone getting notions about what I'm doing until I finish."  For some reason the muddy face of the green-eyed drain worker, staring at him, came back to Snow.

Caleb looked closely at the doctor, who was reading his papers. "Quite. Not necessary at all. And what were your impressions when you first went in?"  Now that he had started the interview Caleb's voice changed, he spoke faster.

"The details are hardly discreet, as you put it."

"Oh, that doesn't matter in this case. No abortions here. We can say what we like."

"Well, there was a smell, first, of cesspools and damp. But then you noticed the cholera smell."

"What? You can smell it?" Caleb's eyes narrowed and he dropped his jaw in disgust.

"Oh, certainly. Sweetish, fishy." Snow looked at a corner of the ceiling, trying to remember the room. "I think the floor was wet with all the excretions. You know, they can lose half their plasma volume in the first few hours from the diarrhea alone?"

He wished he hadn't agreed to tell Caleb the details. He felt the tune coming back, and the sense of grief and loss from before creeping up on him. Suddenly his friend's zeal was distasteful.

Caleb cleared his throat. "I thought cholera just made you weak. You faded away." A slight tremor shook his words. The zeal had apparently faded.

Snow laughed, not a real laugh, but a snort of mock disbelief. "You mean you don't know?"

"No. One reads of such and such a number of people dying, but I've never seen it."

"Here's how it works, then.  Every bit of fluid in your body goes out one end or the other. One vomits and one shits until there is nothing left. Excuse me for my bluntness."

Caleb didn't answer. He looked disgusted and fascinated at the same time.

"They simply dry out," continued Snow. "After a few hours, if they're lucky enough to live that long, it's just gray water coming out. Even the diarrhea is just water, as if every drop of fluid is getting squeezed through their tissues. For the fools who still believe in bleeding their patients, the blood comes out thick and gluey, like old molasses. It slows down autopsies. And of course there's the loss of turgor."

"I probably don't want to know, but what's turgor?"

"Pinch your wrist." Caleb was obedient. "Then let go. See? Your skin goes back, of course. In cholera so much body water is lost that the skin has no elasticity. If you pinch up a man's flesh on his arm, it stays there. Like clay." The girl's weak hand hovered before him in his mind, along with the glaze over her blue eyes.

"And after they lose all that fluid, what happens?"

"Death." The word had repeated itself in Snow's mind so many times that day that it had lost meaning, and was simply a sound associated with an end point on a graph. It had nothing to do with sadness or loss or the girl in the attic. "Or recovery. It's a fifty percent chance either way, unless the cholera is malignant. Then the chance of recovery is much smaller."

Caleb swallowed once. "All right, let's get back to this place, the basement. Where were the people?" he asked. "On the floor?"

"No, not exactly. In boxes. Rows of boxes with small corridors down between them."

"Boxes? What do you mean?" Caleb's pencil stopped again.

"Boxes. Like coffins. That's where they sleep in those places.  The penny lodgings. You should go some time, just to see.  There's a wretched sort of padding lining them."

Caleb's pencil was going fast enough now. "And it was dark down there, of course. Hard to see. There was a darker area where they'd piled the bodies. They were short of staff to take them out. I went from box to box and checked on them. Some were already dead, and I informed the caretakers. It was pretty hopeless. And so filthy." Snow remembered a young blond mother and her blond, one-year-old girl, lying squeezed together in a box. Both dead.

"Couldn't you have done anything to help them?" Caleb's voice sounded desperate and demanding. "Surely there is some drug, some treatment?"

"Well. . . hydration injections. Replace the lost body fluids. If there had been clean water, that is. It's worked occasionally, if the situation is spotless and the patient isn't too far gone."

"If it works why didn't you try it? Why not do something?"

Snow laughed, harshly, feeling pie crust caught in his throat.

"Granted, it might work. But that's when you've got one cholera case in a clean, well-lit bedroom off Park Lane, and you can sit there for twelve hours repeating the treatment while they possibly recover. A lady's maid or two to fetch the fresh linen and keep boiling the water. In that cellar it would have been a joke." He paused and was silent for half a minute. "I was just there to take notes, anyway. There's no point in trying to save them."

"Good God, you mean there's really nothing else you can do?"

"What do you expect? All this talk of cures, essence of this or that; it's all lies. Swaine's Revivifying Drops. Opium water is a popular one this year. Yes, it's just as easy to get as it always was. Useless. The only hope is in prevention."

"How many people were down there?"

"I told you, in the list. Fifty-seven. Two to a box. It was crowded. And more brought in while I was there, from a nearby workhouse. But I couldn't stay to count them, or I would have stayed all night."

Caleb stopped writing and both men fell silent.

Snow finally asked, "Do you want the rest of the cases too? The ones still alive this afternoon?"

Caleb pulled a watch from his pocket and checked it unhappily. "God, is it that late? I can't get into any worse trouble than I already am. Might as well stay and finish."

Snow read out the rest of the figures. Their monotonous repetition sent his mind wandering to another time when he and Caleb had sat with their heads hunched over a desk like this.

Years ago it must have been, in the York Technical Secondary School they had both worked so hard to qualify for, getting their figures ready for the Presentation Day. Everyone was going to come; parents, sisters, sweethearts. The students' one day to show their talents and the fruit of this expensive learning.

As a chemistry student he had prepared, with Caleb as his assistant, a delicate reaction of crystallized sulphur with magnesium salts to be acted out for the small audience in the lecture theater. How well he could see it now; the glass tubes and polished brass calipers mounted in precisely cut oak. He was supposed to create a swirling green vapor in a clear tube, with a cloud that would glow and fade slowly.

His father had sat in the first row, his sunburned face tense with doubt and suspicion under the unaccustomed tall hat. He hated Snow's scientific bent. When Snow had told him he wanted to study medicine, his only response had been to snarl, "How do you expect to pay for it, boy?"

Snow had measured wrong, something, he still didn't know quite what. Too much magnesium, not enough sulphur. Or perhaps the little oil lamp was too hot. At any rate, he bungled it. A foul brown fountain splashed into the audience over the gauzy dresses and the stovepipe hats. There was a sulphurous stink like old turkey eggs from the poultry coop behind his father's barn.

People had rushed from the room, handkerchiefs over their faces, while Snow frantically tried to explain. Caleb's arm was badly burned and he had to wear a bandage for weeks. The district medical man, the same one Snow wrote to for help three years later, started Caleb on opium drops for the pain. Even now Snow could remember the broad, peaceful smile on his friend's face as he showed off his recovering burn.

His father's mistrust of science, a farmer's self-righteous conviction, never budged after that. And when it came time to pay the exorbitant license for Snow's first London practice, his father hadn't handed over a penny. Not to mention the transport. Snow had walked the three hundred miles from York to London.

Snow's resentment mingled with the memory of that first remote practice when they'd let him handle the Kellingsworth mine epidemic alone. It was nothing to them how many miners died. There were always more. It was nothing if he himself died, a cheap doctor working for almost as little as the miners themselves.

Surely his father could have done something back then to help him into a better post. His whole body became tense just thinking about it.

"Are you all right?" asked Caleb.

Snow found he'd stopped reading the numbers and was breathing in short, sharp breaths, clutching his pen tightly. Caleb was looking at him, brows drawn together.

The image of Snow's father faded and most of the anger faded with it.

"Yes, yes. We're done, anyway." They really were at the last of the data. After a minute or two of yawning conversation Snow got up to see Caleb out. Mrs. Jarrett had gone to sleep hours ago.

"Same time tomorrow night?" asked Snow.

"If I can. You know how it is with Deborah.ö Caleb shrugged and went down the front steps. The clip of his small boots on the pavement faded down the street. Snow went back upstairs.

It was well past midnight. He opened his laboratory notebook to the spot where he had stopped a few days ago, and went to get the bottled carbonic acid, hydrocyanic acid, and ammonia. The hedgehogs, quiet until now, began to stir again, and the one who favored the wheel started running.

As he adjusted the burners, the tubes, and the heights of the bottles, fumes began to bubble into vials and flasks. He reached for the first cage and opened the small door.

Toward three A.M. shouts came from the street and Snow raised his head from the inert animal. The window was wide open, letting in a hot breeze of roses and horse manure. Snow dimmed his lamp and went to look.

Below him, to the right, two men struggled, locked in a wrestler's grip. Now the only noise was the scrape of their boots on the pavement and their loud grunts as they pushed at each other. One of them finally yanked himself free and stood, panting, staring at the other.

"I won't have it," he said, anger making him loud. "Do your own fuckin' dirty work."

The voice sounded familiar, but Snow couldn't place it.

"Suit yourself," said the other. "Don't come cryin' to me when your wage dries up."

Suddenly a crash of shattering glass came from a few doors down. The two men looked into the darkness and ran off in the opposite direction, toward Piccadilly, still together. Then, from the same spot as the glass, came the splintering groan of a wood door being forced.

The empty houses were fair enough prey for looters. Snow just hoped they didn't start to attack the occupied ones. He went back to his experiment and forgot about both incidents in minutes.

When dawn broke at four-thirty, it was still hot. The hedgehog, its limbs spread-eagled by cotton string and pinned to a board, was beginning to recover from a measured dose of chloroform. It tugged with growing strength at its ties. Before it could hurt itself by pulling too hard, Snow carefully untied the animal and restored it to its cage. It scuffled over to a corner and stared out at him with mistrust. Still doped, its eyes kept falling shut, but then they would jerk open again, glaring at Snow.

He felt a fleeting stab of pity, even though the animal would feel fine in a few hours. Apprehensive scuffling sounds came from the other two in their cages.

Snow closed his notebooks and tossed a few empty test tubes off the sofa onto the carpet. He lay down in his clothes and instantly fell asleep.

HISTORICAL REFERENCES

For a modern description of cholera click here. 

Click here for more information on John Snow's pioneering work with chloroform. 

For more on William Farr and the miasma theory of cholera, click here. 

John Snow was the oldest of nine children.  To learn more about his family, including his father, and early life before leaving home at age 14, click here.