The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

by Lindsey Fitzharris

There was a perceptible shift away from miasma and toward contagion theories in the 1850s and 1860s, due in part to these events. Many doctors, however, remained unconvinced. Snow’s investigations in particular still didn’t suggest a plausible mechanism for the transmission of the disease. His conclusions correlated cholera with contaminated drinking water. But, like other contagionists, Snow didn’t explicitly state what it was that was being transmitted through that water. Was it an animalcule? Or a poisonous chemical? If the latter, wouldn’t it be infinitely diluted in large bodies of water like the river Thames? What’s more, Snow himself acknowledged that contagionism didn’t provide a satisfactory explanation of all diseases, and he continued to allow for the possibility of spontaneous generation in the development of diseases that caused putrefaction, like erysipelas. The voices crying out for a better explanation of contagious and epidemic diseases were growing ever louder.