After John Snow explained his connection between the pump on Broad St and the cholera deaths in the surrounding area, and sufficiently convinced city planners that something dangerous was lurking in the waters, the pump was closed. After closing the well, and thereby removing a serious point of contamination, the epidemic began to slow down in the area affected by the well. Johnson notes the reaction by the Globe.

The Globe published an upbeat—and typically miasmatic—account of the present state of the neighborhood: “Owing to the favorable change in weather, the pestilence which has raged with such frightful severity in this district has abated…(131).”

Reading this made me think of the vaccine scare, and the way news media hyped reports from angry parents who wanted to connect their children’s autism to some palpable causative factor, even though none of the evidence was there. In the case of the Globe’s story, they were likely well aware that a significant change in the neighborhood was the closing of pump. The pump was an important landmark and known for its quality water, and closing it inconvenienced a fair number of people. However the Globe chose to write a story appealing to what people already think, that is, that weather patterns, smells, and air born “humors” somehow cause diseases. This made me think of the vaccine issue, because despite the fact that there has been as far as I know zero proof that vaccines cause autism—and it has been established by researchers that a connecting factor among those babies who have autism and were vaccinated is that they were formula fed, which is much more likely to be related—the concept of autism from vaccines is still in the vernacular. And some publications reported on the issue despite the entire lack of evidence, and only further perpetrated the concept, as with the Globe and the miasma theory.

-Jesse Geisler