Dr William Budd - Bristol health reformer

Gerry Brooke looks back at the life of Dr.William Budd, Bristol’s pioneering public health reformer.

As people flocked into Bristol in Victorian times overcrowding and insanitary conditions soon led to serious outbreaks of disease.

Typhus, typhoid and dysentery were common.

But originating in India, and deadliest of all, was cholera.

When the disease arrived in the city in the summer of 1832 the working-classes - and the medics - reacted with blind panic.

In fact cholera caused only a third of deaths - it was behind consumption and convulsions and not far ahead of those other feared killers, typhus, pneumonia, smallpox and dropsy.

But as medicine could offer no hope this new disease, which could strike and kill within 12 hours, created ripples of fear amongst the public.

With much professional disagreement over both the nature of cholera and its transmission the medics just couldn’t agree on a course of action.

Bristol’s Board of Health advised people to open their windows and doors, clean their privies, whitewash their walls and then, finally, pray to the Almighty to “stay the hand of his avenging angel”.

Quack remedies - often mixtures containing chloride of lime - promised to prevent the disease, but most physicians could only recommend drinking plenty of tea and coffee.

The vain attempts to stop the spread of the disease, such as fumigating the streets with burning tar barrels and juniper berries, seem to us positively medieval.

Given the widespread belief that the victims polluted the soil a new burial ground was opened at the Cattle Market near Temple Meads.

But one enlightened Bristol medic, Dr William Budd, was convinced that the disease was spread through insanitary conditions.

The first deaths, he observed, had occurred in overcrowded conditions near the much polluted River Frome.

“Privies up and down the stream, belonging to the houses which abut upon it, hang over a bank of mud, the level of which is only swept at spring tide” he wrote.

“The state of things in the interval is too loathsome and disgusting to describe.”

To make matters worse the Floating Harbour - non-tidal and full of sewage - stank to high heaven during warm weather.

Despite the evidence all round them most doctors still believed that many illnesses, including typhoid, were caused by breathing in foul or polluted air.

But Dr. William Budd had his doubts.

He became convinced that many diseases was spread by drinking contaminated water or by the sick passing some kind of living organism to the healthy.

But despite their careful observations and scientific findings enlightened doctors like Budd were ridiculed for years.

In the 1830s Victorian Bristol was considered a very unhealthy place to live.

Many people were packed into squalid courts often housing five or six large families clustered around one pump and one toilet.

Only the wealthy citizens of Clifton - some 400 households - had direct access to clean water.

Most people had to make do with water from public wells – often polluted by cesspools – or bought from street sellers.

As most of this came from polluted rivers it’s no wonder many took to drinking beer instead.

Finally, after much hard work by Budd and his colleagues, the true nature of cholera was finally recognised by the authorities.

A brilliant lecturer, the medic must also have been a very persuasive man.

Contrary to the wisdom of the time, he persuaded the ultra conservative and all powerful City Guardians to adopt a rigorous hygiene regime.

Within a generation, Bristol’s streets had been cleared, sanitation dramatically improved and a decent water supply guaranteed.

A Devonian, William Budd had come to Bristol in 1841 to set up a practice at the top of Park Street - where Blackwell’s bookshop now stands in fact.

Despite being well qualified - he had studied medicine in London, Paris and Edinburgh - patients were few and far between.

But in 1847 he was appointed physician to St Peter’s Hospital for the infirm and poor.

This fine 16th-century timbered building, along with St Peter’s church next door, was lost in a Bristol Blitz.

The hospital was very overcrowded and when, in 1831, cholera broke out, casualties had been very high.

In giving evidence to the Health of Towns Commission Budd included graphic descriptions of the appalling conditions that many people lived under.

People were driven to alcohol, he said, simply because they couldn’t stand the abominable stench in their own homes.

In 1849 – two years after he had joined the infirmary staff – cholera erupted again and the 37-year-old medic was able to confirm his theories about infectious disease by first-hand studies.

He even identified a microscopic “fungi” which he believed spread cholera through polluted drinking water.

These “fungi” turned out to be harmless starch and fat – but Budd was certainly on the right track.

When cholera returned in 1854, and again in 1866, the death rate in Bristol turned out to be much lower than elsewhere.

“The seed has been destroyed and the crop has failed,” Budd was to record proudly.

Appointed a director of Bristol Water Works, the medic insisted that its springs and reservoirs must be as far as possible from any sewage contamination.

The water, piped in direct from springs at Dundry and Barrow Gurney, meant Bristol soon had one of the purest supplies in the country.

Public health in the city improved dramatically.

Budd later went on to refine his theories on infectious diseases and how they might spread.

Despite his massive contribution to medical science and public health the medic was barely recognised by the establishment of the day.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1871 but that was his sole honour before being crippled with a stroke some two years later.

He lingered on in ill health until 1880 when he died, aged 69, at Clevedon.

He was buried in Arnos Vale.

The reformer is remembered in the city for which he did so much by a ward in the BRI, a plaque in Park Street and the health centre in Knowle West which bears his name.

This Saturday, courtesy of the Clifton and Hotwell Improvement Society (CHIS), Dr. Budd will be honoured with yet another plaque.

This will be unveiled at his home - No. 13, Lansdown Place, Clifton - at 11am, by Professor David Speller, Emeritus Professor of Clinical Bacteriology at the University of Bristol.