At the moment, I know that cholera is an aggressive disease with high spreading ability and lethality. Its spreading ability has both some inexplicable oddities and several traceable patterns. Shared living space is a contributing factor; however, the degree of cleanness of the place significantly affects the infectivity of cholera. Observations also show that person-to-person contact does not always get a person infected with cholera. I also know that the number of sick and dead people of the working class is larger than that of the wealthier social classes. London in the 19th century was the center of the industrial development of humankind, which negatively affected the urban environment and the city’s ecology. Therefore, it can be concluded that sanitary conditions and personal hygiene are the main factors preventing and spreading cholera. Working-class people present in dirty environments for long periods, interact frequently, live in poor conditions, and are less educated about personal hygiene. That is why the prevalence of cholera in them is higher.
Physicians did not contract cholera since they worked in a clean setting; sanitary measures were sufficiently developed in the 19th century to prevent medical workers from becoming infected in peacetime. Knowing that cholera must be swallowed to begin to affect the human body and the environment must be dirty for the infection to survive, one can assume that human excreta is how the disease spreads. Victorian London was a place where people threw their feces into water sources and sometimes directly defecated into city rivers. Victorian Londoners took their water from fountains, pipes, and water pumps, such as Broad Street one, whose source was the city’s rivers full of human excretions (Savage, 2019). The conclusion is that cholera infection spreads through various human excreta contained in urban water sources and unsanitary places. People drink untreated water or eat food that the sick individual has come into contact with and become infected. Detailed personal experiences of patients and their surroundings are needed to assess the validity of the hypothesis.
References
Savage. C. L. (2019). Public/community health and nursing practice: Caring for populations. F.A. Davis Company.