“We stared at the vegetation for a moment, and I wondered whether the loss of a wife or child had burned the haggard and bluish look of cholera death into his memory. A few years before I was born, the water from a public pump on Broad Street had killed more than six hundred people, marking the end of London’s last cholera epidemic. A cesspit had been dug too close to the public pump, allowing the disease to spread quickly. As soon as both pump and cesspit were shut down, the epidemic ceased.”
