“And it endangers the health of our citizens,” I said.
“Yes, yes. It does do damage to health and property because of the smoke and soot in the air. Winter is the worst, isn’t it? On this holiday everyone is celebrating today - the coal being pushed out of private houses - that is what is primarily responsible for this blanket of darkness.
“Do you realize, Poppy, more than a million chimneys are breathing out smoke and soot and sulphurous acid and carbonic acid gas like fire from a dragon? We are in a crater filled with fumes.
“At least,” he prattled on, “when there is some modicum of a breeze, the smoke removes itself to other parts of the atmosphere and no dark fog forms. But when the earth is not sufficiently warmed by the sun during our winter months, and the air near its surface cannot rise, the lowest atmospheric strata gain little heat and the conditions are perfect to produce such a fog. One filled with flakes of soot, particles of carbon... and these cannot evaporate.”
“It’s so sad, really,” I said. “On a hot, breezy summer Sunday when the factories are not in operation, and fires not so much used for cooking, you can actually see the spires of St. Paul’s or Albert Hall. Now it’s all blurred with smoke.”
“Ah, these are dark and murky days, Poppy. I’ll wager that an easterly breeze blowing from the direction of the East India Docks would bring the smoke of ten miles of houses, and at Holloway, a southerly breeze would be filled with the pollution of seven miles or more. The distance to which coal-smoke travels without reaching the ground seems almost infinite. Richmond is just nine miles from here, but views of it are hidden most of the time by the ugly mist. This grey filth reaches to Belgravia and Mayfair now as well.
“Have you ever watched from shore the smoke of steamers passing through the English Channel on a calm day?” he asked.
I nodded.
“The cloud of smoke left behind lies for hours in the same position, like the long, low hand of the Devil. Today, the quantity of smoke is hundreds, perhaps thousands of times greater. There is no escaping it.”
“It would seem so. But while your scientific analysis is all very interesting, Sherlock, the only thing that matters to me is that people are very ill because of it, dying of it, and I must try to help them. So thank you for the invitation to lunch, but I shall be on my way now.”
“But Poppy, what about the swans?”
My voice shrill, I asked, “What about the swans? Or the bees?” I swallowed hard. “I am sorry, Sherlock. I do love the swans and I know you love your bees. But right now people are a bit more important to me.”
Chapter 4
As I hurried back to my medical office, I pondered Sherlock’s research into the cause of the fog and the illnesses I had been treating all week, but as there was nothing I could do to prevent the fog or eliminate it, the only thing that mattered was how to treat those who came to me for help. The aged, the weak, the infirm suffered most.
A few days before Christmas, my brother Michael had treated three young men, who were out together in the evening. Two immediately fell ill from the effects of the fog and died, and the third had a sharp attack of illness. Deaths from whooping-cough in London were unprecedentedly numerous, almost two hundred. From bronchitis it was far worse. I was no statistician, but the counts at St. Bart’s and St. Thomas were close to seven hundred, and of those, two-thirds were likely due to the character of the fog. It was worse than the casualty count after a great battle. Uncle said that the increase in mortality rates at the hospital were more than fifty percent. I’d read a newspaper article earlier in the week that stated:
It is smoke that makes London fogs so mischievous... The death-rate during a few days of dense fog palpably mounts to an extraordinary degree... It would be idle to doubt that bronchitis and lung-diseases are dangerously heightened by moderately thick smoke-fogs, when the thickest fogs produce so great a mortality from those diseases... we must reckon a large annual loss of life from the perpetual presence in the London atmosphere of smoke and soot... especially those which happen to be in a weak state of health, as those recovering from fever.
Surely, I thought, if someone like Sherlock Holmes attacked this dilemma as he did his criminal cases... if he would investigate it and determine the exact nature of the ‘crime,’ he could find a solution. But I highly doubted he had any such inclination.
Much to my surprise, when I arrived at my office near the British Museum, patients stood in a queue that reached down the hallway. I surmised that the range outside the hospital was full, that they had nowhere else to go, and that they had concluded that even a young, female doctor was better than none at all. I did wonder if my brother Michael had sent some of the overflow at the hospital directly to me. I ushered them in and asked them to be seated. Then I set about the business of treating them.
Young and old, male and female, common workers and genteel alike, all presented with symptoms such as I had usually seen only in the chimney sweeps, street sweepers and dustmen. I examined one after another, each complaining of cough and phlegm and dyspnea - difficult or laboured breathing. Upon examination, each one had enlarged airspaces, hyperinflated chests, reduced expiratory breath sounds, and obstructed airways. The causes of bronchitis in those who were not engaged in dusty occupations was clearly the atmospheric and domestic air
