Cholera
Cholera became widespread during the 1840s. The causes were not known; the most widely accepted notion was that the disease was due to air-borne "miasma". Because of the miasmatic theory's predominance among scientists, the 1854 discovery by Filippo Pacini of Vibrio cholerae, the bacterium that caused the disease, was ignored until it was rediscovered thirty years later by Robert Koch. In 1854 London physician Dr John Snow discovered that the disease was transmitted by drinking water contaminated by sewage after an epidemic centred in Soho, but this idea was not widely accepted. Consolidating several separate local bodies concerned with sewers, the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers was established in 1848; it surveyed London's antiquated sewerage system and began ridding the capital of its cesspits—an objective later accelerated by the "Great Stink".
Read more about this topic: Great Stink
Famous quotes containing the word cholera:
“Love isn’t actually a feeling at all—it’s an illness, a certain condition of body and soul.... Usually it takes possession of someone without his permission, all of a sudden, against his will—just like cholera or a fever.”
—Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883)
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—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)