After the closing of the Broad Street well did the public health community abandon the concept of miasma? Did they wholeheartedly embrace the idea that cholera and many diseases could be transmitted through water? They did not. Even though they supported closing the well based on Snow’s evidence, in their final report they still attributed the outbreak to an atmosphere (not a water supply) that was “offensive with effluvia from ill-conditioned sewers; the houses were almost universally affected in the same manner” along with blaming the architecture creating bad air flow. They still believed in miasma. Writing of the report issued by the committee, Johnson himself acknowledges this, but he is careful in his assessment of their work to not indict their intentions: “They were not hacks, working surreptitiously for Victorian special-interest groups. They were not blinded by politics or personal ambition. They were blinded by an idea.”
patrick lynch