Born in York, England on March 15, 1813, John Snow is the first out of nine children. Snow grew up in a poor family and lived in the poorest city. His house was always in danger of flooding because of how close it was to the River Ouse. John’s father, William Snow, was a laborer that worked …show more content…
Although Snow had been very involved in his experiments using a new technique, known as anesthesia, he was also interested in researching the origin and cause of Cholera. Snow had convinced himself to be skeptical of the popular theory of his time called the Miasma Theory. This theory had suggested that diseases such as the bubonic plague and cholera were a result of nothing more than “bad air”. During John’s time the germ theory of diseases which correctly explains the mechanisms by which diseases are transmitted had not yet been developed. So when the first cases of cholera in England were reported during 1831 which was around the time he had finished up his doctoral studies at the young age of eighteen. Tens and thousands of people had died from cholera. In Snow’s time, people did not have running water or toilets in their homes so they used communal pumps and wells to get water for washing, drinking and cooking. Out of observation Snow believed that because there was sewage being dumped into a local water supply that this was the cause of a rapid spread of diseases. Living near the suburb of Soho, known for the origin of the cholera outbreak in London, Snow immediately went to work in order to prove his …show more content…
Snow worked around the clock in order to figure out information from local hospitals and public records. Snow tried narrowing down when the outbreak had first begun and whether or not the victims who drank water from the Broad Street pump were correlated. Throughout Snow’s findings, he noted on his map spatial clustering’s of incidents within a particular water pump near Broad and Cambridge Street. After eventually tracking down hundreds of cases of locations that were fairly near the Broad Street, Snow narrowed down his findings to prove that the Broad Street pump was the ultimate source. One such finding that helped justify his idea was a prison near Soho that had around 550 inmates and absolutely no cases of cholera. He discovered that the prison had its own pump and bought a majority of their water from a water company. Eventually, when studying the broad street pump he collected a sample of the water and discovered it to be tainted with specks of white matter in it. As Snow went back to his map, to finalize and note his findings he came to an anomaly that was worth noting. One particular case that was noted through the map was of a case of two women, a niece and her aunt, who had died of cholera. This case was interesting to Snow because the aunt has lived a very far distance from the location of the pump. After talking