The Pumphandle Lecture, established in 1993, is an annual lecture held around September to celebrate the removal of the Broad Street pump handle that took place in September 1854 during the cholera epidemic in Soho. It is organised by the John Snow Society, named for John Snow, and takes place at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Following the lecture the speaker performs a ceremonial removal and replacement of the pump handle and members proceed to the John Snow pub.
History The Pumphandle Lecture was established in 1993 by the John Snow Society, named for John Snow, to celebrate the removal of the Broad Street pump handle that took place in September 1854 during the cholera epidemic in Soho. It is held every year around September.
The inaugural lecture was delivered by Nick Ward and chaired by Paul Fine.
Lectures
+List of speakers Year ImageSpeaker Nationality Title Notes 1993 Nick Ward "Global Polio Eradication – a call for action" 1994 Spence Galbraith "Dr John Snow – Early Life and Later Triumphs" 1995 Sandy Cairncross "Turning the Worm – The Guinea Worm eradication programme" 1996 Richard Feachem "Would John Snow have joined the world bank?" 1997 Hugh Pennington "E. coli in Scotland – the relevance of John Snow and William Whewell’s consilience of induction" 1998 Richard J. Evans "Koch, Pettenkofer and the search for the cause of cholera" 1999 Chris Bartlett "Removing the pump handle at an international level" 2000 John Oxford "The search for permafrost and other victims of the 1918 Influenza" 2001 David Bradley "John Snow in the world of today" 2002 David Salisbury "Managing vaccine adverse effects" 2003 Mike Ryan "Epidemics in the 21st Century, the lesson of SARS" 2004 Alain Moren "Challenges for field epidemiology training in a widening Europe" 2005 Tore Godal "Everything is Impossible until it has been done" 2006 Jamie Bartram "Drinking Water - Where Science Meets Policy" 2007 Donald Henderson "Polio Eradication, a reconsideration of strategy" 2008 Patrick Wall "Food Safety – Media based or Risk Based controls?" 2009 David L. Heymann "When Nature turns cook – The epidemiologist’s feast" 2010 David Nabarro "Sapiens, Synergy, Solidarite, Success" 2011 Hans Rosling "Epidemiology for the Bottom Billion – where there is not even a pump handle to remove!" 2012 Tom Frieden "What pump handles need to be removed to save the most lives in this century? 2013 Julie Cliff "From London to Mozambique, from cholera to konzo" 2014 Jeremy Farrar "Medicine and public health: divorced for too long" 2015 Atul Gawande "On removing the pumphandle: innovation and implementation" 2016 Paul B. Spiegel "The Syrian conflict and its effect on the future of humanitarian response: We need a new pumphandle" 2017 Richard Horton "Life and Death in 2100: Health, History and Human Contingency" 2018 Joanne Liu "The Cost of Fear: Humanitarian Crises in the Age of Anxiety" 2019 Eliza Manningham-Buller "Promoting Medical Science in an Age of Scepticism" 2020 John Nkengasong "Africa CDC: A New Public Health Order" 2021 Anthony Fauci "COVID-19: Lessons Learned and Remaining Challenges" 2022 Andrew Haines "The imperative of climate action for health" 2023 Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala"Global health equity and the role of trade" 2024Soumya Swaminathan“Pandemics, Climate Change and the Role of Science”2025Cesar Victora"From local insights to global impact: Four decades of child health and nutrition epidemiology in Pelotas, Brazil"2026 Hamid Jafari"From Outbreaks to Endgame, The Fight to End Polio"
References