John Snow and His Work on Cholera.
John Snow(1813 – 1858). On March 15, 1813, English physician and a leader in the adoption of anaesthesia and medical hygiene John Snow was born. He is considered one of the fathers of modern epidemiology, in part because of his work in tracing the source of a cholera outbreak in Soho London in 1854. John Snow studied in York until the age of 14, when he was apprenticed to William Hardcastle, a surgeon in Newcastle upon Tyne. In 1831, it is believed that he first encountered cholera. The disease entered Newcastle and devastated the town. Snow enrolled as the Hunterian school of medicine on Great Windmill Street, London in 1836. He began his career at the Westminster Hospital in 1837 and was admitted as a member of the Royal College of Surgeons of England one year later. Snow was also admitted to the Royal College of Physicians and became one of the founding members of the Epidemiological Society of London, formed in response to the cholera outbreak of 1849. During his work as a physician, John Snow was one of the first to study the dosages of ether and chloroform as surgical anaesthetics. He managed to design a device to administer ether to his patients and he designed masks to administer the chloroform. Snow is said to have personally administered chloroform to Queen Victoria when she gave birth to the last two of her nine children. Back then, the London sewer system had not reached the Soho district yet and as a result, Soho had to deal with serious health and hygiene problems. London's government also decided to dump the city's wte into the River Thames which caused a dramatic pollution of the water and eventually leading to the famous cholera outbreak of 1854. John Snow referred to the outbreak as "the most terrible outbreak of cholera which ever occurred in this kingdom". Starting at the end of August, 1854, the outbreak caused presumably 500 deaths by September 10. John Snow began investigating the disease by talking to locals. He managed to identify the source of the outbreak as the public water pump on Broad Street, today Broadwick Street. He performed several chemical experiments and microscope examinations. Eventually, authorities agreed to disable the well pump, ending the outbreak. Snow later started to map how the cases of cholera were centered on the pump. With the help of statistics and what is today known as the Voronoi diagram, Snow illustrated the quality of the source of water and cholera cases. Snow noticed one significant anomaly, being that none of the monks in the adjacent monastery contracted cholera. It turned out that the monks drank only beer, which they brewed themselves. Due to the fermented water, residents in the brewery were not infected. Snow also found out that Southwark and Vauxhall Waterworks Company was taking water from sewage-polluted sections of the Thames and delivering the water to homes with an increased incidence of cholera. In the history of public health and health geography, Snow's study was probably the founding events of the science of epidemiology. At yovisto, you may learn more about Cholera in the 19th century by Bohumil Drassar.