Better in their words…

Scientific Consensus is an oxymoron.  People, let’s think clearly here. What happened in Snow’s days is very much alive today.  mrossol

Source: NO CONSENSUS ☙ Friday, October 17, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS

The Sad Story of John Snow and “Scientific Consensus”

John Snow is a bona-fide hero of science. (* Not the surly bastard prince from Game of Thrones.) Snow might be one of the most famous doctors in the great pantheon of famous historical epidemiologists. Epidemiologists often celebrate Snow as the crowning example of the triumph of scientific reasoning and “medical detective work.” But that is rank revisionism. Snow IS a hero, but he’s definitely not Science’s hero.

Science appropriated John Snow after he died penniless and forgotten, whitewashing their culpability. But Snow was never one of their own. He was opposed by Science at every step.

Cholera has plagued mankind since the dawn of history. It is still plagueing us. Just a handful of years ago in 2010, UN Peacekeepers set up a camp in Haiti to “help” those unfortunate citizens recover from a devastating earthquake. The Peacekeepers needed to evacuate their sewage somewhere; a local river seemed like a good spot. And so the cholera epidemic created by the United Nations condemned 10,000 Haitians to horrible deaths and sickened countless more.

In 2016, after six years of lawsuits, the UN finally admitted responsibility. Sorry, Haiti. The checks are still in processing.

In a single year, 1832, cholera claimed 100,000 lives in France. These weren’t just “deaths with cholera.” These were legit deaths from cholera. You can’t possibly mistake it. Cholera isn’t flu like. Let’s just say that choosing between dying either from cholera or by sliding down a giant razor blade would take some thought.

Descriptions of the progress of the disease seem literally unbelievable. One British doctor described the onset of initial symptoms like “being hit with a club.” It gets worse from there — horrifyingly worse. Even many of those who survive cholera must first pass through a time when they surely wish they haddied.

💉 For several decades in the early 1800’s, a great cholera pandemic raged through most of Asia and Europe. It would spread around the world before it was finished, ultimately making its way across the Atlantic and eventually killing millions from Asia to North Africa to the United States and even Cuba.

“A malady yet more terrible than the yellow fever appeared on the banks of the Ganges. After having devastated India and desolated Persia, it showed itself at length in Syria and now threatens destruction even amongst European nations.”

— M. Keraudren, Memoire sur le Cholera Morbus de l’inde, 1831.

Cholera occupies a special position in the satanic inventory of horrid disease. A lot of literature has been written about and around the illness. (Love in the Time of Cholera is one well-known example.) Arguably, no other single disease has wrought such a profound effect on the psyche of the human spirit.

💉 But perhaps the most significant and enduring story out of all the many cholera stories is the true story of how John Snow, a “simple anesthesiologist,” single-handedly — against all odds — saved humanity from remaining mere playthings for the disease. Despite science’s revisionist efforts to claim him for themselves, John Snow was a free thinker. He rejected “scientific consensus,” and thought for himself.

And they destroyed him for it.

By the 1830’s, the cholera pandemic had been wreaking havoc in the East for almost fifteen years. At a time in history when record-keeping was spotty at best, and when there were billions fewer humans on the planet than there are now, it had already killed hundreds of thousands, maybe more. Now it was spreading west from Russia. The British saw it coming and studied its inevitable approach with horrified intensity. In spite of extensive precautions by the British government, including quarantining all ships arriving from countries known to be afflicted, the disease finally arrived on the island. It was ugly, to say the least.

In 1853, a 40-year old anesthesiologist named John Snow practiced in London. Though uncredentialed, and not part of the professional classes, Snow was interested in disease, and he helped found the London Epidemiological Society. Snow made a living but was never financially successful. He spent too much of his time providing free medical care for the poor and traveling around rural Britain on his own dime to help people. He was described as “reserved, clever, but peculiar.”

In 1853, something captured all of Snow’s attention. Cholera, having savaged the island nation in the 1830’s, was back.

💉 By the 1850’s, Britain was already well organized with regard to the whole cholera thing. Scientists had been intently studying the pestilential disease for decades. London’s Board of Health —a vast, elite, and inscrutable bureaucracy— set the scientific consensus of that time, and declared that cholera was caused by miasmas.

A ‘miasma’ was simply a “bad air.”

The consensus was that “bad air” rose out of garbage, sewage, and bad sanitation and sort of floated around an area making people sick. Or something. The Board of Health employed hives of sanitary inspectors who scurried around issuing citations, swanking their impressive authority, and otherwise trying to ‘improve’ the city’s sanitary environment.

It is undeniable now that the Board of Health — one of the first big government public health agencies — ultimately lost the thread of its essential mission. By 1853, it had become another entrenched British bureaucracy with its own Byzantine politics, and was mostly concerned with its own power and the never-ending expansion of its budget. It wouldn’t be completely unfair to say even that cholera was good for business— if, that is, you were a government health agency in 1850s London.

At that time, the Board of Health focused on organizing and promoting large-scale, multi-year, expansive civil engineering projects intended to improve the city’s sewer systems. These massive projects provided countless opportunities for graft by politicians and extremely lucrative money-making opportunities for politically connected contractors.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Surely, these improvements in the sewers helped with disease control, especially a disease like cholera, since it is actually transmitted in sewage, not in “miasma,” whatever that is.

That would be true, except for one thing. The problem was that the Board’s projects were designed to funnel the city’s raw, untreated sewage right into the Thames river — London’s main source of drinking water. Just as the United Nations did to Haiti in 2010, this practice helped spread the disease even faster, farther, and more efficiently than it would have done naturally.

In other words, the government solutions, based on the sound scientific consensus of the day, were actually killing the British faster and more effectively than the disease could ever have hoped to do on its own.

💉 Understanding this ugly background helps explain why John Snow’s wild idea — that cholera actually spreads by a pathogen in contaminated water, not “bad air” — was profoundly, politically, and scientifically threatening. Snow’s hypothesis threatened to expose the government’s destructive choices and worse, threatened to plug up the vast river of money flowing from the victims’ taxes to politically favored groups of the time, including scientists and bureaucrats infesting the nascent public health establishment.

It’s a good thing those kinds of perverse incentives could never happen now. Am I right? Hello? Buehler?

Contemporaneous scientific studies published in the Lancet in the 1850’s — still (for some reason) considered one of the world’s premier scientific medical journals — accepted the Board’s “miasma” theory as an established fact, constantly lauded the Board of Health’s gigantophilic sewage projects, demanded ever more government “sanitary oversight,” and more construction projects, and of course, relentless expansion of the Board’s already morbidly obese budget.

This, my friends, is the cookbook. It is a construction formula for how the slurry of scientific “consensus” becomes hardened into a deadly cement of politics, money, connections, invested interests, and intertwined incentives.

To the Scientific Establishment, all those conflicted interests, all invested in the same ‘consensus’ of perverse incentives, must be protected at all costs. If the scientific consensus is ever proven wrong, questioned, or if the public loses confidence in it, a lot of folks stand to lose a lot of money.

Officials might even be blamed, perish the thought. There could be Exposure. Embarassment. Thus, any heterodox (non-consensus) ideas that challenge consensus become viral particles that threaten established interests themselves. Like host antibodies, orthodoxy (scientific consensus) fiercely seeks out any non-conforming ideas and eats them alive.

💉 The most well-known part of Snow’s story involves a cholera outbreak in London’s SoHo district. Because the establishment at the time was studiously ignoring all his pesky questions about miasmas, Snow personally did a lot of his own detective work, on the ground, as it were, down in SoHo.

He began to notice a curious pattern in the way that cholera had spread out in a kind of circle radiating from SoHo’s center. So he went down to the center of SoHo and found a public water well.

Fighting the scientific establishment and its consensus “miasma” theory every step of the way, Snow finally convinced the reluctant local council to let him just temporarily remove the well’s pump handle— ensuring Snow’s name would never be forgotten and enshrining him in the false collective memory of scientific accomplishment.

Thus, an unassuming SoHo water source became the most famous well in scientific and medical history. It will forever be known to medical students as “the contaminated Broad Street Well.”

💉 And what do you know? Immediately after Snow snagged the pump handle, SoHo’s cholera infections dropped sharply. Snow was right. Something in the water was making people sick. It was obvious.

And so, as you would expect, the Board of Health immediately re-evaluated its consensus theory, and started wholesale revising its approach to managing cholera. It stopped dumping raw sewage into the Thames, and everybody lived happily ever after.

Haha, of course, I am joking! What actually happened was that all the ministers and scientists at the Board of Health immediately undertook a concerted effort to discredit and destroy one John Snow.

If you can believe it, they tore into him even more fiercely than if he had been pushing ivermectin or bleach injections. If Snow had posted a video about his well experiment, YouTube would have taken it down immediately and deleted his account moments after the government would have accused Snow of literally killing grandma with his dangerous well idea.

Instead, the Board of Health continued to deny Snow’s water-transmission hypothesis for ten more years. During that time, cholera continued to have its way with Britain, ravaging the tiny island nation’s cities, needlessly killing thousands, or tens of thousands of taxpayers. Maybe more.

Those deaths, like so many others, lie right on public health’s doorstep.

💉 But how about other scientists, ones outside of the Board of Health? Like the storied members of the elite Royal Academy? Did they rise to Snow’s defense, arguing he should get a fair hearing? Did they express scientific curiosity about his well experiment? Did they even give it a moment’s thought?

Nope.

In 1855, the Lancet — again, the world’s premier scientific medical journal — published a scathing editorial that, if Snow’s reputation had not already been completely destroyed, surely finished the job. The Lancet’s editorial supported the Board of Health’s commissioning of a special medical council to investigate not the water but Dr. John Snow.

The council’s “investigation” concluded that Snow’s core theory — that some unidentified pathogen in water transmitted cholera — was “scientifically unsound.” Actually, strike that, his idea was downright dangerous! It was intolerably dangerous disinformation, and was likely to mislead the public.

After all, science had reached a consensus that “miasma” caused cholera. Not germs.

After its careful and scientific investigation of the Broad Street Well matter, and of its bank account balances, the Board’s committee finally concluded that Snow was dead wrong about that whole well thing. The well water had nothing whatsoever to do with cholera, it said. “After careful inquiry,” the Board sneered, “we see no reason to adopt this belief. We do not find it that the water was contaminated in the manner alleged.”

They ordered the Broad Street pump handle to be reattached.

Pouring acid into the injury, they high-mindedly pointed out that Snow wasn’t even a proper epidemiologist. He was just an anesthesiologist —unqualified! No credentials! An amateur! A charity doctor! Not a proper epidemiologist, not like Anthony Fauci, for example. Snow lacked degrees and peer reviews, and so he should just shut the hell up.

Snow was finished. It was him against the British Government and its entire scientific establishment. There was simply no way he could survive their all-out war. They demolished him just like he was a building in the way of a sanity improvement project.

💉 Although Snow was finished, a spent force, the Board of Health wasn’t finished with its destructive rampage. They needed to make an example. To keep future upstarts like Snow from poking their heads above the group. So they spent the next five years making 100% sure that everyone knew exactly how much Snow had been talking out of his hat.

But dammit, the well. It stood in SoHo like a silent rebuke. There was a pesky problem—the residents of SoHo were obviously better. It was so obvious a child could see it. The Public wasn’t using the well, not like before, because they were infected with misinformation.

So the Board needed to nuke the whole well idea for good.

In 1854, they tacked toward a third way. This time, they admitted that maybe Snow wasn’t completely wrong, not exactly. He wasn’t right, either, don’t be silly. He’d just been lucky. He’d tumbled into a discovery, like a witless pig toppling into street manure. According to the British Lords of Public Health:

“Thus, if the Broad Street pump did actually become a source of disease to persons dwelling at a distance, we believe that this may have depended on other organic impurities than those exclusively referred to, and may have arisen, not in its containing choleraic excrements, but simply in the fact of its impure waters having participated in the atmospheric infection of the district.”

See? It was so simple. Even John Snow could see that cholera doesn’t infect people through contaminated water. It’s the other way around. The miasmas in the atmosphere must have infected the water. Duh! That should have been obvious. It had always been miasmas, just like their treasured consensus said.

At that point, John Snow had officially become not only misguided, but a dangerous fraud. Officially. As a matter of public record. Everybody who was anybody said so. Snow’s malfeasance became part of the permanent consensus itself. Now, they smugly said, Snow’s name would forevermore be synonymous with “dangerous moron.”

💉 It would take thirteen long years, until 1866, when another epidemiological great named William Farr finally proved that John Snow had been right all along about cholera. But it was too late for Snow. He died in 1858, disgraced, professionally ruined. He was only 45. He never lived to see his theory — his correct theory — overthrow the “consensus.”

Indeed, the consensus overthrew him before he’d buttered his breakfast biscuits.

Probably the first chapter in every modern textbook on epidemiology used in every medical school includes John Snow’s story. Well, not exactly. They include a carefully whitewashed and co-opted version of the story. Students memorize a moving story about great medical detective work and simple practical solutions like removing the Broad Street well’s pump handle.

In more honest textbooks, students might even learn about how unschooled anesthesiologists can sometimes help epidemiologists. Sometimes.

But there is not a single reference in any of those textbooks about the danger of scientific consensus, how John Snow defied The Science and found the truth, or the insane risks of mixing politics and money with science to create its bastard child, “Science!” with an exclamation point. There’s nothing at all in those textbooks about the poisonous miasma that results from mixing money and politics with science.

Which is too bad. Because, if you think about it, that’s really the most important part of Snow’s story. Frankly, I’m sick to death of hearing about “scientific consensus.” Scientific consensus is a blight. It’s a plague. Consensus is the opposite of science. “Scientific consensus” is an oxymoron, like saying “jumbo shrimp” or “seriously funny.”

But it’s not at all funny.

How many hundreds of thousands or millions of human lives around the world would have been saved if Snow’s simple theory had been given a fair hearing by the well-funded apparatus of the Board of Health? After the pump handle incident, lives weren’t really lost to cholera.

After Snow’s discovery, every single person who died was killed by consensus. Scientific consensus is a deadly disease all on its own.

The reason the textbooks obscure John Snow’s real story is because it cuts too close to the truth: that the thing we call “science” is often just politics wearing a stethoscope. Snow wasn’t defeated by disease. He was killed by the cure — money and politics shrouded in a fatal illusion of consensus.

And if you’ve somehow missed the whole point and still think it couldn’t happen again, well… for Heaven’s sake, take a look around.

Let’s all vow to always remember the real lesson John Snow taught us, that orthodoxy and consensus are the worst public health menaces of all.

“Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right.” — author Michael Crichton.

Have a fantastic Friday! I’ll return tomorrow, to wrangle this week’s incredible breaking news into an action-packed Weekend Edition roundup.

Give a gift subscription

Share