The noisome pestilence

The day has been spent taking the Old Man back to London.

Not far from his home in Hampstead is this stone tablet set in a wall. For years I squinted at it trying to decipher the inscription but the railing stops you getting close and the letters under the protective shelf have eroded away. Eventually I succeeded in finding out that it commemorates the establishment of the Hampstead Provident Dispensary in 1846. This acted as a sick relief club. Members paid a weekly contribution and in return received support if they fell ill. Later a dedicated building, which included a soup kitchen, was paid for by funds raised in local churches and chapels in gratitude, according to the inscription, "to Almighty God for His special mercy in sparing this parish from the visitation of cholera in the year 1849. He shall deliver thee from the Noisome Pestilence."

Cholera was a major scourge in Victorian cities, ravaging the poorest areas where people were crammed together without sanitation or clean water. It could take you from health to death in a matter of hours and was highly contagious. Here's just one contemporary newspaper account of its ghastly progress in one already wretched household in 1831.

An Irish vagrant, who has a lodging at the head of Toll-street, went over to Sunderland to collect rags and beg. He returned home to his wife and four children drunk, and after abusing his wife shamefully, was taken ill of cholera. Several medical men were called in, and succeeded in arresting the progress of the disease; but in three days afterwards, his wife, a stout, healthy woman, who had attended on him during his illness, was attacked by the disease, and died in about fifteen hours. A poor woman had been got to attend upon her and the children about half an hour before she died, and every precaution adopted that the medical men could think of; but the husband had secreted a bundle of his rags under his bed, and on the nurse going out for a short time on Monday last, he had crawled out of bed, sorted his rags on the floor, and sent one of his children to sell them in the town. The nurse, on her return, found the effluvia so noisome that she directly took ill, and died in about eight hours. Infection or contagion seems to be established beyond doubt.
But the cause of the infection remained a mystery: 'bad air' was the chief suspect.

However, while the Hampstead Dispensary was being built and the local people thanked God for their deliverance, a London doctor solved the mystery. As the epidemic decimated the inhabitants of other areas of London Dr John Snow had the idea of mapping the fatalities in relation to their access to drinking water. In this way he was able to identify a cluster of deaths around Broad Street, Soho. To confirm his suspicions that the water supply was contaminated he had the handle of the neighbourhood pump removed so that local people could not use it and had to go elsewhere for water. His conclusion was borne out by the fact that a north London family who routinely went miles to fetch water from Broad Street fell victim to the Noisome Pestilence while their Hampstead neighbours did not. John Snow is regarded as the founder of epidemiology and it's to him, not God, that thanks are due.