Famous Pump-handle, Overlooked Friendship

drawing titled
“Death’s Dispensary”

It is one of those legends of modern science that is usually told in a way that obscures almost as much as it reveals.  Like this:                          A terrible cholera epidemic is terrorizing London in 1854. The physician John Snow, defying the prevailing medical thinking, hypothesizes that the epidemic is caused not by foul air but by contaminated water.  He scientifically marks on a map the instances of cholera, and the instances are like arrows pointing to a public well on Broad Street at the intersection of Cambridge St. Snow removes the pump-handle, rendering the well useless.  And the number of cases of cholera, which had been surging, plummets.  Sure enough, the well's water was being polluted by fecal sewage.

Historians of science, however, point to many distortions in such a depiction.  Just to start with, people in the London neighborhood knew of many individuals who had drunk from the Broad Street pump but had not become ill.  Also, the statistics about cholera victims that John Snow gathered did not point like unquestionable evidence to that pump.  There were many anomalies.  Some families farther from that pump and near sources of clean water had still died.  And other people who worked at a brewery one block from the Broad Street pump were spared.  Snow had to laboriously search out explanations for each anomaly.  (Such as that the brewery workers were provided malt liquor by their employers, and so drank little water.)

The myth-like depiction also misrepresents the removal of the pump handle and what happened afterward.  Snow did not remove the handle himself:  He got the prompt cooperation of an only initially reluctant Board of Governors.  And even after its removal, the decline in cholera was not clear-cut proof because -- as Snow himself admitted -- the terrible wave of cholera had already begun to decline.  Nor had Snow scientifically surveyed the survivors as a scientific control.

Also, those opponents of Snow who held to the traditional view that vapors in the air were the suspect had a decent argument.  London's air was notoriously foul.  A few decades earlier, the poet Percy Shelley had written that, “Hell is a city much like London,” and the city's situation was hardly better in 1854.

The contemporary writer Steven Johnson, in his fascinating book The Ghost Map, points to a perhaps even more significant distortion:

"There is a kind of mythology that stories like this one tend inevitably to drift toward:
the lone genius shaking off the chains of conventional wisdom....
  [But] intellectual breakthroughs [are] rarely the isolated genius
 having a eureka moment alone in the lab."

In this regard, the physician John Snow stood on the shoulders of centuries of awareness that human sewage had to be sequestered and removed (as demonstrated by the sewage systems of even ancient Rome).  Also, for his mapping, Snow used death statistics that were continuously compiled by the city demographer William Farr.

Henry Whitehead

Even more likely to be overlooked is an Anglican minister, Henry Whitehead, who worked out of a church four blocks from the pump, and who had an intimate knowledge of people in the overcrowded slum -- including the survivors.  Thus were a clergyman's ministry and a scientist's research brought together.  The author Johnson explains how Whitehead and Snow, as they joined their investigations, developed "a quiet but profound friendship."

~ ~ ~

Have you known any religiously devoted people who minister to others with medical care?

(The quotation by Percy Bysshe Shelley is from “Peter Bell the Third,” 1819.)
(The Steven Johnson quotation is from The Ghost Map: The Story of London's  Most Terrifying Epidemic --
and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, © 2006, pp. 144, 149 & 181.)

Moving and Memories

Have you ever woken out of a dream in which you had been in a place where you previously lived?  Such dreams are not uncommon.  They were also the framework drawn upon by Marcel Proust to begin his masterwork novel Remembrance of Things Past.  The author tells of how, sometimes dozing in and out of sleep, he would awake disoriented, not sure at first where he was.  He easily imagined for a moment that he was in a childhood or other earlier bedroom. As Proust wrote, "When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years."

Such dreams fascinate me because they express so well how making sense of new experiences and challenges involves placing them within the context of something we already know.  New situations, particularly demanding ones, can be disorienting, just as Proust was momentarily disoriented.  Drawing upon abilities we already possess can help us orient ourselves in less familiar situations -- just as the dream of a familiar room and walls reveals our subconscious's drawing upon something deeply rooted within us.

Thinking back upon our lives, if we have lived in more then one location, we can recall times of transition that entailed moving.  Some moves can be exhilarating; others can be frightening. Leaving for college can be an exciting, hopeful time despite its uncertainties.  Being forced to move because of divorce is inevitably stressful, the atmosphere of a failed marriage suffocating for the time any joy that once was.

Reflecting upon this matter of moving leads me to thoughts of those non-human animals that must make frequent moves.  Twice a year, thousands of wildebeests make a mass migration covering many miles of East Africa.  Annual migrations by bird species, usually north and south, are an integral part of their lives.  Historians have sometimes employed the world "migration" to describe the movement of groups of people as they relocated, but those human "migrations" are in most cases once-in-a-lifetime, in contrast with the demand that instinct places upon such animal species every single year.  Nevertheless, in that instinct lies salvation, protecting the species against too severe weather, and offering the hope of food ahead.

I wonder if animals who migrate have dreams of previous homes.  I do know that researchers in laboratories have been able to detect through brain waves that rats dream about a new task they were challenged with the day before.  Birds are not as biologically close to us as such mammals, but might they also be dreaming of flying when their wings flutter while asleep?

Ecologists speak of "niches" in which species have evolved, finding their place in a life-giving way.  Human beings, try to find their place spiritually in relation to a Higher Truth or Power. Thousands of years ago, one ancient Hebrew, going to the temple for spiritual reorientation, looked up and was encouraged to see that the temple had also provided niches in its walls for nesting birds:

"How lovely is your dwelling place, O LORD....

Even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a nest for herself,

 where she may lay her young."

~~~

Have you ever made a move that entailed not just relocation but also growth?

(The Proust quote is from the opening chapter, "Overture," of the first book, Swann's Way,

 in Marcel Proust's 1913-1927 opus, trans by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, © 1928.)

(The quotation about the temple niches is from the Hebrew Bible [Christian New Testament], Psalm 84:1, 3 [NRSV])
(Photo of wildebeests, by Bjørn Christian Tørrissen, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license.)