Abstract

Two nineteenth-century acts on disease are often told as the moments when evidence persuaded authority: the removal of the handle of the Broad Street pump in London in September 1854, after John Snow laid his inquiry before a parish board, and the treatment of Joseph Meister, a boy bitten by a rabid dog, which Louis Pasteur began in Paris in July 1885 and reported to the Académie des sciences that October. This article asks whether, on the evidence of the two men's own reports, each act was won by evidence or by the circle of allies around it. The question joins a debate in the history of science between Gerald Geison, who set Pasteur's laboratory notebooks against his published account and found that the published report led readers to believe in a test that had not been made, and Bruno Latour, who argued that Pasteur's successes rested on alliances through which laboratory results were made to hold outside the laboratory. Peter Vinten-Johansen and his colleagues supply the matching case for Snow: a handle removed on a curve that was already falling. Reading Snow's second edition of 1855 at length, and Pasteur's report in close paraphrase (its only available text is an uncorrected machine reading), the article finds that neither report rests on evidence alone or on alliance alone. Each puts named witnesses into its text, each describes an act whose own effect could not be read from its outcome, and each says so in its own words. Beside the reports stand the modern summaries that Skeptron, a history studio of the RISCON family, wrote of both cases; they keep the limits the authors drew and, in one place, name a person the report leaves unnamed. The article does not decide the debate; it shows what the reports allow each side to claim.