In the 1854 Soho cholera outbreak, John Snow found that the 70 workers of the Lion Brewery on Broad Street had not contracted cholera — even though the brewery sat about 30 metres from the contaminated pump. Why were they spared?
Snow personally visited the brewery and asked the owner Edward Huggins. The answer: each worker had a daily allowance of about four pints of the brewery's beer — a standard 19th-century brewery practice. The brewing process (boiling, fermentation, alcohol) would have killed the bacterium even if it were present, and the brewery drew water from its own well 15 metres deep, away from the cesspit that was contaminating the Broad Street pump. The 70 uninfected workers became one of Snow's strongest pieces of natural-experimental evidence.
Read the full story →The Lion Brewery on Broad Street stood about thirty metres from the contaminated pump that killed five hundred people in the 1854 Soho cholera outbreak. None of its seventy workers died. They drank approximately four pints of beer each daily from the brewery's own well — and the well was uncontaminated.
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