York's hidden history: Dr John Snow, public health pioneer

NOWADAYS, North Street in the heart of York boasts a Radisson hotel, Tah Tien, a Thai street-food restaurant, Chico’s, a fast-food outlet and All Saints, a well-kept church.

But in the 19th century it was considered one of the poorest streets in the city. The river regularly flooded, pouring sewage and other refuse into the street and leaving an unpleasant stench behind it.

On March 15, 1813 John Snow was born here, the eldest of William and Frances Snow’s nine children. William Snow earned his living as a labourer in a local coal-yard which serviced the numerous barges that plied the River Ouse back and forth from the Yorkshire coalfields.

John was christened at All Saints’ Church in North Street and went on to become a pioneer in medicine and enjoy worldwide fame.

Image of Dr John Snow

At the age of 14, he was taken on as a surgeon-apothecary apprentice with William Hardcastle in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Here he had his first professional brush with a cholera epidemic in the coal-mining village of Killingworth.

In October 1836 he moved to London and enrolled at the Hunterian School of Medicine on Great Windmill Street in the heart of the capital. After qualifying as a doctor, he continued to work at Westminster Hospital and later set up practice at 54 Frith Street in Soho as a surgeon and general practitioner.

From the earliest years of his professional career, John Snow was interested in patients with respiratory diseases. He researched the physiology of neonatal respiration, oxygen consumption and the effects of body temperature change.

He went on to make major contributions to two fields of medicine: anaesthetics and epidemiology.

By 1840 Snow had acquired the reputation of the most accomplished anaesthetist in Britain. Chloroform had recently been introduced but Snow realised that it had to be administered carefully in measured dosages.

It was his contribution to the use of chloroform at the second stage of childbirth that made him well-known as a public figure. Snow established that chloroform should be administered to a pregnant mother to the point where she was nearly but not fully unconscious. On April 7 1853, no less a person than Queen Victoria herself invited Snow to administer chloroform to her during the delivery of her eighth child Leopold.

He then repeated the procedure with the delivery of the Queen’s daughter Beatrice in 1857. Up until this time, it was widely thought, even by the influential Church of England, that using chloroform as an anaesthetic in childbirth was unethical. Snow initially met with opposition, but his safe and measured use of it to aid the delivery of Royal children began to dispel these scruples.

Snow was now a famous anaesthetist. But it was in the field of epidemiology that this accomplished doctor achieved true worldwide fame. In fact, Snow’s findings can be said to mark the beginning of this branch of medicine. For centuries the prevailing view had been that contagious diseases such as cholera and bubonic plague were caused by impurities in the air, the so-called miasma theory. The germ theory hadn’t yet developed. Snow’s observations of the evidence led him to discount this ‘bad air’ notion.

Memorial to John Snow in York

In particular, his detailed investigation into the water supply in spreading disease was to herald changes that went well beyond the practice of medicine into far-reaching changes in public policy.

In 1854 there was a cholera outbreak in Soho. With the help of his colleague Henry Whitehead, Snow interviewed the residents around Broad Street (nowadays Broadwick Street) and made chemical and microscopic examinations of water samples from the Broad Street water-pump. He also studied the patterns made by the spread of the disease.

His studies convinced him that cholera was transmitted by the infected water at the pump, and he persuaded the local authority to remove the pump handle.

We shouldn’t think, however, that John Snow convinced everyone of his findings, and as the Soho cholera outbreak subsided, the local authority restored the Broad Street pump handle, but Snow’s discoveries eventually led to major changes in public health policy throughout the country and the world.

York's blue plaque to John Snow

Today, an annual Pumphandle Lecture is still held at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine to celebrate the removal of the Broad Street pump handle and, more particularly, John Snow’s discoveries with their huge impact on public health policy worldwide. At the end of each lecture, there is a ceremonial removal of the Broad Street pump handle, after which the lecturer and members of the John Snow Society repair to the John Snow pub in Soho.

So much for Dr John Snow’s public life. What about his private life? He enjoyed swimming. He was vegetarian and later a vegan. And for most of his life was teetotal, having become a member of York Temperance Society in 1845.

He never married and lived at 18 Sackville Street from 1852 until his death in 1858 at the age of 45 when he suffered a stroke.

It’s thought that his health was adversely affected by his frequent exposure to the chemicals and gases used in medical practice at the time. Yet he left a momentous legacy. It can truly be said of him that he contributed to advances in medicine that have saved countless lives around the globe.

David Wilson is a Community Writer with The Press