Skip to main content

The Medical Detective – Sandra Hempel ****

With the terrible disease cholera at its heart, this is anything but a pleasant book to read – but that doesn’t stop it being horribly fascinating.
Sandra Hempel has a gift for taking the reader into the heart of period medicine. Primarily a biography of John Snow, the man who cracked the mechanism for cholera’s spread, The Medical Detective also gives us a good deal of (sometimes graphic) description of the impact of cholera, an in-depth consideration of the UK political reaction to the cholera outbreaks, and a good feeling for the working environment that Snow would be familiar with. Although the US title, The Strange Case of the Broad Street Pump, is more effective in bringing out the medical Sherlock Holmes mystery aspect of the story, the Broad Street incident, of which more later, is very much the climax of the book, not cropping up until over half way through.
Perhaps the most shattering aspect of Hempel’s story is the description of the Tooting child farm. One of the places cholera would break out, this was a location that would make Oliver Twist’s early experiences seem relatively mild. Hundreds of destitute children, crammed into insanitary and disgusting conditions, simply to collect the fee the government paid for looking after them, then to keep them on a fraction of it, making a huge profit. It’s somehow not surprising that Dickens was one of the journalists who wrote about this disgrace after it was discovered.
Back on the case, Snow’s great breakthrough was to uncover the way that cholera spread, thanks to some classic detective work. The mechanism for cholera’s progress had always been something of a mystery. Sometimes it spread gradually in a tight knit community – but would leave pockets untouched. Sometimes it would jump hundreds of miles. It seemed different from something like plague, with its clear person-to-person spread. Although John Snow had made his name as an early exponent of anaesthesia, he had from his early days in medicine had a strongly-felt need to investigate the causes of cholera. Relatively early he developed a theory that it was spread through tainted drinking water. He was able to perform an early piece of epidemiology, getting statistics for the different attack rates for an area before and after conversion to a clean water supply, compared with other boroughs who water was little more than dilute sewage. But the big breakthrough came by studying an outbreak in an area of central London, plotting cases on a map like a modern forensic scientist, Snow would find the epicentre – a water pump in Broad Street. A conclusive argument for the mechanism of cholera’s spreading would follow, though sadly, despite the myth of Snow’s last minute saving of the district, too late to help much in this particularly virulent outbreak, and not widely accept for several years to come.
Broad Street has since been re-christened Broadwick Street, and now houses two of the UK’s biggest magazine companies. Somehow it’s appropriate that the home of Good Housekeeping and House Beautiful should be the very street where it was discovered that inappropriate handling of sewage and water supplies could result in the spread of this terrible disease.
Throughout, Hempel maintains an interesting thread, and though the early chapters on the background of cholera and the ventures into politics aren’t as gripping as those where we get the central character of John Snow involved, she tells a powerful and engaging story of this classic piece of medical detective work. Recommended.

Hardback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Philip Ball - How Life Works Interview

Philip Ball is one of the most versatile science writers operating today, covering topics from colour and music to modern myths and the new biology. He is also a broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour, The Music Instinct, and Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball is also a presenter of Science Stories, the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. He is also the author of The Modern Myths. He lives in London. His latest title is How Life Works . Your book is about the ’new biology’ - how new is ’new’? Great question – because there might be some dispute about that! Many

Stephen Hawking: Genius at Work - Roger Highfield ****

It is easy to suspect that a biographical book from highly-illustrated publisher Dorling Kindersley would be mostly high level fluff, so I was pleasantly surprised at the depth Roger Highfield has worked into this large-format title. Yes, we get some of the ephemera so beloved of such books, such as a whole page dedicated to Hawking's coxing blazer - but there is plenty on Hawking's scientific life and particularly on his many scientific ideas. I've read a couple of biographies of Hawking, but I still came across aspects of his lesser fields here that I didn't remember, as well as the inevitable topics, ranging from Hawking radiation to his attempts to quell the out-of-control nature of the possible string theory universes. We also get plenty of coverage of what could be classified as Hawking the celebrity, whether it be a photograph with the Obamas in the White House, his appearances on Star Trek TNG and The Big Bang Theory or representations of him in the Simpsons. Ha

The Blind Spot - Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson ****

This is a curate's egg - sections are gripping, others rather dull. Overall the writing could be better... but the central message is fascinating and the book gets four stars despite everything because of this. That central message is that, as the subtitle says, science can't ignore human experience. This is not a cry for 'my truth'. The concept comes from scientists and philosophers of science. Instead it refers to the way that it is very easy to make a handful of mistakes about what we are doing with science, as a result of which most people (including many scientists) totally misunderstand the process and the implications. At the heart of this is confusing mathematical models with reality. It's all too easy when a mathematical model matches observation well to think of that model and its related concepts as factual. What the authors describe as 'the blind spot' is a combination of a number of such errors. These include what the authors call 'the bifur