The Broad Street pump, Soho

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The public water pump on Broad Street in Soho, London — the street is now Broadwick Street — at the centre of the cholera outbreak of late August and September 1854, in which several hundred people in a few surrounding streets died within days. Snow persuaded the parish authorities to remove the pump handle on 8 September 1854; the outbreak was already declining by then, so the removal did not end it, and the pump's significance is evidential rather than therapeutic. A replica pump and a plaque now mark the site. The case is taught as the origin of field epidemiology, and it is worth teaching alongside its own limitation: a single compelling map persuaded almost nobody at the time, and the sanitary reform that followed was driven by statistics and stench rather than by Snow's inference.