The young Snow observed that the sanitary conditions in the mine were dreadful, with workers granted no separate quarters to relieve themselves, thus forcing them to eat and defecate in the same dark, stifling caverns. The idea that the cholera outbreak was rooted in the social conditions of these impoverished workers—and not in any innate susceptibility to the disease—lodged in the back of Snow’s mind as the cholera ran its course.
