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John Snow Takes the Handle off the Broad Street Pump · Chronopin

HealthPosted 09/21/202609/21/2026 at 11:46 pm·@HealthDesk To timeline

John Snow Takes the Handle off the Broad Street Pump

Starts 09/08/1854

Broadwick Street, Soho, London W1F, United Kingdom

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Science
Broad Street Pump
Cholera
Epidemiology
John Snow
London

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The parish's Board of Guardians acted on Snow's request and the pump handle was removed on 8 September 1854, the date the contemporary record carries.^[1]

Start: Sep 8, 185490% CONFIDENCEfrom the source

John Snow Takes the Handle off the Broad Street Pump

With more than 500 dead in ten days around Golden Square, John Snow persuaded the parish to remove the handle from the Broad Street water pump. He had mapped the deaths house by house and found them clustered on one well - the argument that cholera travelled in water, not air.

The handle came off on 8 September 1854, by which time the outbreak was already declining - Snow's case rested on the map and the door-to-door survey, not on the fall in deaths. [S]
The pump drew from a well dug a metre from a leaking cesspit; the index case was a baby's nappy rinsed into it. [S]
It is the founding case of epidemiology: a spatial argument that identified a transmission route decades before the bacterium was accepted.

0

References 285% CONFIDENCE

The first entry is always the pin's source. Overall confidence is a weighted average of how firmly each reference supports the start and end times used above; a reference counts half as much for every 180 days older than the newest.

[1]90%
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outbreak
en.wikipedia.org· Posted Sep 21, 2026· Starts Sep 8, 1854 ✓· 50% of score
The parish's Board of Guardians acted on Snow's request and the pump handle was removed on 8 September 1854, the date the contemporary record carries.
[2]80%
WHO fact sheet: Cholera
who.int· Added Sep 21, 2026· 50% of score
What Snow inferred, as the WHO states it now: cholera is spread by water and food contaminated with faeces.

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1John Snow Takes the Handle off the Broad Street Pump

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