3 - Nature’s Not-So-Perfect Food: The Epidemiology of Milk-Borne Typhoid

Summary

In the summer of 1873 London was again the center of a public spectacle over the filth disease. It began with England’s fever expert. On July 22 three of Charles Murchison’s children—the two oldest and the baby—came down with well-marked cases of typhoid. They were sent on July 25 to recover at the family’s Cumbrian summer home in Westmorland, far away from the fetid air of London. But days later, on July 31, three more Murchison children came down with the disease, sending the house into a panic. With his children “hovering between life and death,” Murchison set out to answer why his house had been attacked. He was one of Europe’s leading authorities on typhoid and had been physician at the London Fever Hospital for fifteen years. A month earlier, in June, he had finished a second edition of the magisterial Continued Fevers of Great Britain, judging that a revised work was needed because of increased “public as well as professional interest in the subject.” England was just recovering, after all, from the Prince of Wales’s near-death experience from typhoid, as we saw in chapter 1. What Murchison did not suspect was that soon typhoid would demand all of his personal attention. Typhoid, Murchison had long held, was not contagious, although as he concluded in the 1873 edition, in rare instances it might be communicable. So he went peering around his house’s drains and water closets. But his house on Wimpole Street, in the St. Marylebone parish of London, was in scrupulous order, “the most perfect sanitary condition.” He had consulted none other than the engineering expert Robert Rawlinson. Convinced that it was not the usual domestic sanitary suspects at fault, Murchison turned to his neighbors, who were doctors in the popular West End. What he found was astonishing: on Wimpole Street and Harley Street, at Cavendish, Grosvenor, and Portman Squares, “the hidden foe has struck at some of the best known among his medical opponents.” Although Murchison knew better, public discourse held that typhoid was supposed to be the “disease of dirt,” as the Daily Telegraph noted. So why had it struck the children of London’s best doctors?