Andrew Doig's "This Mortal Coil"

Andrew Doig is Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Manchester. He studied Natural Science and Chemistry at the University of Cambridge, and Biochemistry at Stanford University Medical School. He became a lecturer in Manchester in 1994, where he has been ever since. His research is on computational biology, neuroscience, dementia, developmental biology and proteins.

Doig applied the “Page 99 Test” to This Mortal Coil: A History of Death, his first book, and reported the following:

From page 99:

7

The Blue Death

All that would be required to prevent the disease would be such a close attention to cleanliness in cooking and eating, and to drainage and water supply, as is desirable at all times.

John Snow

Cholera, the most terrifying disease of the nineteenth century, entered Britain for the first time in 1831, brought by ship to the north-east port of Sunderland. While cholera had tormented people in India for thousands of years, it was only when it reached Europe that the key steps were taken to reveal its cause. From 1816, cholera spread from Bengal in seven great waves. The first took four years to cross India, then fanned out, getting as far as Java, the Caspian Sea and China before fading away by 1826. As travel increased throughout the world, the second pandemic of 1829–51 made it further, killing miners in the California Gold Rush, pilgrims in Mecca and survivors of the Potato Famine in Ireland. The most recent pandemic ended only in 1975, though still around 100,000 people get the disease every year, with a few thousand dying. The worst outbreak in recent times followed the earthquake of 2010 in Haiti, which devastated the capital city of Port-au-Prince. In its aftermath, about 700,000 people contracted cholera, and nearly 10,000 died. Cholera was greatly feared and not just for the numbers of deaths it caused. Even in 1832, at the height of the epidemic, it caused only 6 per cent of the total deaths in the UK, with tuberculosis at number one. What was remarkable was the high mortality rate and the short time – perhaps only 12 hours – between good health and death. Before 1831, it was known to be only a matter of time before it made it to Britain. When the inevitable happened, the medical and popular press terrified the public with stories of the unstoppable and deadly new disease.

We now know that cholera is caused by a bacterium called Vibrio cholerae.

Page 99 introduces the chapter on cholera, including John Snow’s pioneering work on how the disease is transmitted by infected water. This is an excellent example of how This Mortal Coil discusses causes of death and how many were defeated.

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--Marshal Zeringue