Talk:1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak

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This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Karinekhoder.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 16:30, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Adwowk1. Peer reviewers: Henryschuh, Ssimko1.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 12:57, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Mortality figures

After reading Ghoast Map I don't think that this story can be fully explained without mentioning the decision to publish the Mortality figures for London.--Drgs100 (talk) 15:57, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Date of outbreak

Most textbooks date the Broad Street outbreak to 1848/9, not 1854. Only the Vauxhall/Southwark versus Lambeth outbreak/study was 1953/4. This article (and the main page on Snow) seems to get it wrong and/or conflate the two. R0 (talk) 01:54, 15 January 2011 (UTC)

I'm confused by your complaint, but according to this [1] the outbreak in 1854 was the outbreak where Snow made his map that demonstrated the spread of cholera. Remember (talk) 16:05, 15 January 2011 (UTC)

I think the title should be "Broad Street cholera outbreak of 1854." The problem with "1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak" is that "1854 Broad Street" reads as a street address (and that's how I read it). Montereyham (talk) 19:45, 3 September 2021 (UTC)

Nearby monastery

"There was one significant anomaly - none of the monks in the adjacent monastery contracted cholera. Investigation showed that this was not an anomaly, but further evidence, for they drank only beer, which they brewed themselves."

Is there any more information on this monastery? There seems to be little to suggest it was an Anglican community (of men, given the quote talks about monks), and as Catholic Emancipation was relatively new at this point, I wonder whether any of the Catholic communities in exile on the Continent would have made it back to London - and this part of London - by that time. As far as I'm aware, there were no other religious movements in the UK at the time which had any form of religious life, and non-Christian monasticism tends to eschew alcohol.

Nongrockle (talk) 07:30, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

Huh?

"After the cholera epidemic had subsided, government officials replaced the Broad Street Pump Handle." Oh never mind, I realized I missed something and wrote something dumb. Sorry. I do still think this section could be clearer about when Snow's ideas were finally accepted.

Requested move 26 January 2016

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: not moved. There is a consensus that, unless the article is expanded, renaming to "1854 London cholera outbreak" would misrepresent the scope of the article. Jenks24 (talk) 08:31, 3 February 2016 (UTC)

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1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak → 1854 London cholera outbreak – Unless I'm mistaken, the "Broad Street outbreak" is not a common scholarly term for this topic, so it's already an invented description. Replacing "Broad Street" with "London" would improve the article title according to several of the naming criteria.

• It would be more recognizable to readers who are not familiar with the history of cholera or London's streets.
• It is more natural to search for cholera in London than cholera on Broad Street.
• It would not lose precision, since this was presumably the only cholera outbreak in London in 1854.
• It would be shorter.

(Adherence to the naming conventions for health incidents and outbreaks would be unchanged, of course.) larryv (talk) 07:42, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

• Support: Oppose. After searching the literature, it appears the best name would be 1854 Broad Street pump cholera outbreak. This is how the outbreak is known and the original editor who named it apparently missed the importance of the water pump as the source. The lede sentence will make it plain that it occurred in London and this way it will separate it from other outbreaks that occurred in London. It needs to be clear that this occurred in London and the current title doesn't make that clear.That said, it is actually well known to epidemiologists as the Broad Street pump cholera outbreak. Dr. John Snow traced the source of the 1854 outbreak to the pump on Broad Street and his methods became the basis for modern epidemiology. This is why the name has stuck. The naming convention in epidemiology is to name the local area where an outbreak occurs. However, using Broad Street doesn't clarify that the city is London. I would add in the lede sentence "also known as the Broad Street pump cholera outbreak." SW3 5DL (talk) 17:07, 26 January 2016 (UTC)
  • Ah, interesting. The article really ought to have at least one citation that makes it clear that "Broad Street outbreak" is something epidemiologists actually say. But that's a different discussion :) larryv (talk) 21:52, 26 January 2016 (UTC)
  • It's in the literature. SW3 5DL (talk) 05:08, 27 January 2016 (UTC)
• Conditional support — if the alternate name is included in the first sentence of the lede. Google searches are able to parse out alternate names in bold so that anyone searching for the Broad Street cholera outbreak will have this as their first hit. CFCF 💌 📧 11:02, 27 January 2016 (UTC)
  • Oppose following comment about other outbreaks by Johnbod. CFCF 💌 📧 00:17, 2 February 2016 (UTC)
• Not very keen The "Broad Street pump" is indeed famous and referred to in the literature, so the premises of the nomination fall down at once. Are we sure there were not other outbreaks in London that year? No, indeed from the article: "On 31 August 1854, after several other outbreaks had occurred elsewhere in the city,...". Any new name should probably keep Broad Street, but I agree London needs to be in there too. I suggest trying another title. Johnbod (talk) 17:31, 31 January 2016 (UTC)
• Dream that the article would be beefed up to include information about the whole London 1854 cholera outbreak, including the particular focus along Broad St where John Snow swooped to the rescue. Then it would be more appropriate to rename it 1854 London cholera outbreak as originally proposed. Until then, I fear 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak may be the best description for this particular article. Ajpolino (talk) 01:25, 2 February 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose per Johnbod. --Tom (LT) (talk) 05:40, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

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The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Some structure/content feedback

The recent additions to the article add a lot of useful, well-sourced information on this incident. I think the overall article could be made more straightforward by rearranging some of the info. To me, it'd make more sense to describe the series of events in one section and the impact on understanding of contagion/disease in another.

In terms of content, the article is thorough. To me, it seems like linking to the Miasma Theory/Germ Theory articles would suffice instead of reiterating their basic definitions (or, if you do choose to reiterate, also link from those section subheaders). I think it'd be good to add more information on Whitehead's role, if it is available, and consider integrating that into the main description of the sequence of events.

Henryschuh (talk) 21:56, 16 March 2017 (UTC)

Conclusion

Hey, over all really good job with this article. It's very thorough and well thought out and I like the way you break down the different theories of the time like miasma vs. germ. But I think you're leaving a few things out. First, I think it's important to discuss the socioeconomic status of the people living in the neighborhood as well as why the Broad Street pump was so widely used. Secondly, you may allude to this but you never actually say it from what I saw. The consensus seems to be that a contaminated diaper was responsible for the cholera outbreak so I think you need to explicitly state that. Ssimko1 (talk) 18:00, 22 March 2017 (UTC)

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The 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak was a severe outbreak of cholera that occurred near Broad Street (now Broadwick Street), in the London district of Soho, during the 1846–1860 worldwide cholera pandemic. The outbreak, which killed 616 people and had a mortality rate of 12.8 per thousand in some areas, is best known for the study of its causes by the physician John Snow and his hypothesis that germ-contaminated water was the source of cholera, rather than particles in the air (referred to as miasma). This discovery came to influence public health and the construction of improved sanitation facilities beginning in the mid–19th century. This dot map of Soho drawn by Snow shows clusters of cholera cases (indicated by stacked rectangles) in the 1854 outbreak. He identified a contaminated pump, located at the junction of Broad Street and Cambridge Street, as the source. The map, published in Snow's book On the Mode of Communication of Cholera, marks an important part of the development of epidemiology as a field, and of disease mapping as a whole.

Map credit: John Snow

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