John Snow

Assembled from 20 blocks · 1 evidence · 10 related

1. Story
2. English physician (1813–1858), a pioneer of anaesthesia and the author of the argument that cholera is spread by contaminated water rather than by foul air. During the 1854 Soho outbreak he mapped deaths against the water pumps that served them and identified the Broad Street pump; he also assembled the larger and stronger natural experiment of the South London water supply, comparing mortality among households served by the Lambeth company, which had moved its intake upstream of the sewage outfalls, with those served by the Southwark and Vauxhall company, which had not. The second study is the better epidemiology and the first is the better story. Snow died in 1858, four years before Pasteur's work and long before the cholera vibrio was accepted as its cause; his conclusion was correct and his mechanism was unproven in his lifetime.
3. Knowledge
4. Sanitation and water treatment
5. John Snow
6. The Broad Street pump, Soho
7. Connections
8. The Broad Street pump, Soho
9. Sanitation and water treatment
10. The Broad Street pump handle is removed
11. John Snow
12. The Broad Street pump handle is removed
13. Edwin Chadwick
14. The rise in life expectancy at birth
15. The collapse of infant and child mortality
16. John Snow
17. The Broad Street pump handle is removed
18. Routine chlorination of a municipal water supply begins in the United States
19. Evidence
20. Supports the waterborne-transmission argument, the Broad Street investigation and the South London water-supply comparison. V55 verification basis: not consulted in this session; the 8 September 1854 handle-removal date comes from the standard secondary account rather than from the monograph.