The Ghost Map: A Street, an Epidemic and the Hidden Power of Urban Networks.
by Steven Johnson · 18 Oct 2006 · 304pp · 88,773 words
the top of Berwick Street, a yellow flag was raised to alert the residents that the cholera had struck. The gesture was superfluous. You could see the dead being wheeled down the street by the cartload. JOHN SNOW Sunday, September 3 THE INVESTIGATOR BY SUNDAY MORNING, A STRANGE QUIET HAD OVERTAKEN the streets
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low in his investigations. He would play a defining role in the battle against the era’s most relentless killer. But before he could tackle cholera, John Snow set his sights on one of the most excruciating deficiencies of Victorian medicine: pain management. WHERE SHEER PHYSICAL BRUTALITY WAS CONCERNED, THERE was little in
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attended on the queen’s body, but the body politic remained outside Snow’s frame of reference. Cholera would change all that. WE DON’T KNOW EXACTLY WHAT SEQUENCE OF EVENTS turned John Snow’s interest toward cholera in the late 1840s. For this working physician and researcher, of course, the disease would have
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water, remained locked in a life-or-death struggle with the disease. Not one other case of cholera in Hampstead would be recorded for weeks. IT’S ENTIRELY LIKELY THAT HENRY WHITEHEAD PASSED JOHN Snow on the streets of Soho that early evening. The young curate had toiled through another exhausting day, and
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certainly a fact worth investigating—if the pestilence ever moved on from Golden Square long enough to investigate anything. Fifteen blocks away, on Sackville Street, John Snow was contemplating statistics as well. He had already sketched out a plan to ask William Farr for an early look at the mortality numbers. Perhaps
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, since simply breathing in the vicinity of an outbreak was assumed by almost everyone to be risking death. John Snow had at least the courage of his convictions to rely on: if the cholera was in the water, then venturing into the Golden Square neighborhood at the height of the epidemic posed no
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yet entered mainstream scientific thought, and cholera itself was largely assumed by the miasmatists to be some kind of atmospheric pollution, not a living creature. Pacini’s paper was ignored, and V. cholerae retreated back into the invisible kingdom of microbes for another thirty years. John Snow would go to his grave never learning
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a small vial of water, mark it with the address, and analyze the contents when he returned home. SO THIS IS WHERE JOHN SNOW FOUND HIMSELF PROFESSIONally when the cholera arrived at Golden Square: splitting his days between chloroform and shoe leather, leading a double life of celebrated anesthesiologist and South London investigator
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how he laboured, at what cost, and at what risk. Wherever cholera was visitant, there was he in the midst.” It’s unlikely that anyone in London that day had a better sense of the outbreak’s magnitude than John Snow and Henry Whitehead. But ironically, their local knowledge of Broad Street made
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the beginning. Whitehead would end up pursuing details of the Broad Street outbreak further than he ever imagined in the coming months—further, indeed, than John Snow himself would venture. In late November, the vestry of St. James’ voted to form a committee to investigate the Broad Street outbreak, initially planning
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profile of the index case perfectly: an attack of cholera that occurred three days before the first wave of the general outbreak, where the victim’s evacuations were deposited a matter of feet from the Broad Street well. It was exactly as John Snow had predicted. Whitehead convened the Vestry Committee immediately, and
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was lost under the sheer mass of data that Cooper had charted. For a map to explain the true cause behind the Broad Street outbreak, it needed to show less, not more. JOHN SNOW BEGAN WORKING ON HIS FIRST MAP OF THE Broad Street outbreak sometime in the early fall of 1854. Its initial
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neighborhood—an emblem that, paradoxically, was made possible by a savage attack on that community. As for influence, it’s pretty to think of John Snow unveiling the map before the Epidemiological Society to amazed and thunderous applause, and to glowing reviews in The Lancet the next week. But that’s not how
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the outbreak. The map may not have persuaded Benjamin Hall of the dangers of contaminated water in the spring of 1855. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t change the world in the long run. Imagining the chain of events this way makes one fact overwhelmingly clear: John Snow may have been
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might have hoped that cholera would prove central to his legacy, but in the first obituary that ran after his death it didn’t even warrant a mention. AFTER YEARS OF BUREAUCRATIC WAFFLING, THE GREAT STINK finally motivated the authorities to deal with the crucial issue that John Snow had identified a decade
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was William Farr who did the first round of detective work. Puzzled by the sudden explosion of cholera in the city after a decade of relative dormancy, Farr thought of his old sparring partner, John Snow, and his surveys of the South London water companies that had brought Snow so regularly to the
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from the site of the pump that once nearly destroyed the neighborhood. Only the name of the pub has changed. It is now called The John Snow. VIBRIO CHOLERAE Epilogue BROAD STREET REVISITED SOMEWHERE IN THE WORLD, RIGHT ABOUT NOW, A VILLAGER is moving her family to a city somewhere, or an urban
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. But we should also be comforted by how far we have advanced in our ability to anticipate these cross-species transmissions. When John Snow identified the waterborne nature of cholera in the middle of the nineteenth century, he was using the tools of science and statistics to find a way around the fundamental
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it’s too late for the vaccine to stop the spread of disease. Combating this new reality will take a twenty-first-century version of John Snow’s map: making visible patterns in the daily flow of lives and deaths that constitute the metabolism of a city, the rising and falling fortunes of
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ago as I write, Dean. Brooklyn July 2006 APPENDIX: NOTES ON FURTHER READING THERE ARE TWO INDISPENSABLE RESOURCES FOR UNDERstanding the life and work of John Snow. The first is the exhaustive Web archive devoted to all things Snow, maintained by the UCLA epidemiology professor Ralph Frerichs. The site, accessible at www
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. Both resources were essential to the writing of this book, and I highly recommend them for anyone interested in exploring John Snow’s work in more detail. For readers interested in the map itself, and in Snow’s legacy as an information designer, Edward Tufte’s account is by now the canonical one
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significant distortions. Many accounts assume that Snow created the map during the outbreak, or that he developed the waterborne theory from his investigations at Broad Street. Henry Whitehead is often ignored altogether. And so the best sources for understanding the outbreak are still John Snow and Henry Whitehead themselves. Their various published accounts
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1854, p. 5. page 58 But one Soho resident The details of John Snow’s investigation of the Broad Street outbreak are drawn primarily from his account of the outbreak and its aftermath, in his report published in the Cholera Inquiry Committee report of 1855, and in his revised monograph, On the Mode
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and Communication of Cholera. page 59 He would largely avoid meat Details on Snow’s life up to his cholera investigations are drawn from four primary sources: Richardson’s hagiographic “Life of John Snow,” published shortly after Snow’s death; David Shephard’s biography John Snow: Anaesthetist to a Queen and Epidemiologist
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Frerichs’ invaluable John Snow Web archive hosted by UCLA’s School of Public Health
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’s own accounts, published in the various editions of “On the Mode and Communication of Cholera.” page 74 it didn’t include the false leads J. M. Eyler, “The Changing Assessments of John Snow’s and William Farr’s Cholera Studies,” Sozial- und Präventivmedizin 46 (2001), pp. 225–32. page 75 “The experimentum crucis
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95 Largely freed from waterborne disease Standage, p. 201. page 99 John Snow would go to his grave A comprehensive overview of the discovery of the cholera bacterium, including a biographical sketch of Pacini himself, is available online at the UCLA John Snow archive at http:www.ph.ucla.edu/EPI/snow/firstdiscoveredcholera.html. page
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History. New York: Penguin, 2005. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Schocken, 1986. Bingham, P., N. O. Verlander, and M. J. Cheal. “John Snow, William Farr and the 1849 Outbreak of Cholera That Affected London: A Reworking of the Data Highlights the Importance of the Water Supply.” Public Health 118 (2004): 387–94. Brand
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, Stewart. “City Planet.” http://www.strategy-business.com/press/16635507/06109. Brody, H., et al. “John Snow Revisited: Getting a Handle on the Broad
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England. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1968. Eyler, J. M., “The Changing Assessments of John Snow’s and William Farr’s Cholera Studies,” Sozial- und Präventivmedizin 46 (2001), pp. 225–32. Farr, William. “Report on the Cholera Epidemic of 1866 in England.” In U.K. Parliament, Sessional Papers, 1867–1868, vol. 37. Faruque
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Time. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. Koch, Tom. Cartographies of Disease: Maps, Mapping, and Medicine. Redlands, CA: ESRI Press, 2005. Kostof, Spiro. The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History. Boston: Little, Brown, 1991. Lilienfeld, A. M., and D. E. Lilienfeld. “John Snow, the Broad Street Pump and Modern Epidemiology.” International Journal of Epidemiology
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Is, and What It Is Not. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1992. Owen, David. “Green Manhattan.” The New Yorker, October 18, 2004. Paneth, Nigel. “Assessing the Contributions of John Snow to Epidemiology: 150 Years After Removal of the Broad Street Pump Handle.” Epidemiology 15 (2004): 514–16. Picard, Liza. Victorian London: The Life of a
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Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001. Rawnsley, Hardwicke D. Henry Whitehead. 1825–1896: A Memorial Sketch. Glasgow, 1898. Richardson, Benjamin W. “The Life of John Snow.” In John Snow, On Chloroform and Other Anaesthetics, ed. B. W. Richardson. London, 1858. Ridley, Matt. Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters. New York: HarperCollins
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of Sanitary Science and the Public Health with Special Reference to the Causation and Prevention of Infectious Diseases. New York, 1902. Shephard, David A. E. John Snow: Anaesthetist to a Queen and Epidemiologist to a Nation: A Biography. Cornwall, Prince Edward Island: York Point, 1995. Smith, George Davey. “Commentary: Behind the
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Molecular Changes, More Particularly in Their Relation to Epidemic Diseases.” London: Churchill, 1853. In Snow on Cholera, ed. Wade Hampton Frost. New York: Hafner, 1965. Snow, John, and Richard H. Ellis. The Case Books of Dr. John Snow. London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1994. Snow, John, Wade Hampton Frost, and
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for Scientific Inquiries in Relation to the Cholera-Epidemic of 1854.” London: HMSO, 1855. Vandenbroucke, J. P. “Snow and the Broad Street Pump: A Rediscovery.” Lancet, November 11, 2000, pp. 64–68. Vandenbroucke, J. P., H. M. Eelkman Rooda, and H. Beukers. “Who Made John Snow a Hero?” American Journal of Epidemiology 133
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, no. 10 (1991): 967–73. Vinten-Johansen, Peter, et al. Cholera, Chloroform, and the Science of Medicine: A Life of John Snow. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. White, G. L. “Epidemiologic Adventure: The
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Influence of Snow’s map, 198–201 Information technology, 218–19, 224–25 Inner-city air, as disease source, 69–70, 74 Inner-city life, in Victorian era, 171 Insulin, 223 Intellectual progress, 135, 149 Internal-constitution theory of cholera spread, 132–33 Internet, 218–19, 236–37 John Snow sites, 259, 261 Istanbul
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, Sultaneyli village, 216 Jacobs, Jane, 18, 221–22 Death and Life of the Great American City, 235 James, John, 34 Jennings, George, 12 John Snow (pub), 228 Kamen, Dean, 217 Kay-Shuttleworth
Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts About Alternative Medicine
by Edzard Ernst and Simon Singh · 17 Aug 2008 · 357pp · 110,072 words
23,000 people died; this was followed by the 1849 epidemic, which killed 53,000. During the 1849 epidemic the obstetrician Dr John Snow questioned the established theory that cholera was spread through the air by unknown poisonous vapours. He had been a pioneer of anaesthesia and had administered chloroform to Queen Victoria
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the world’s first epidemiologist, had demonstrated the power of the new scientific approach to medicine, and in 1866 Britain suffered its last cholera outbreak. Figure 4 John Snow’s map of cholera deaths in Soho, 1854. Each black oblong represents one death, and the Broad Street pump can be seen at the centre of
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2006; 259:125–37. Chapter 3: The Truth About Homeopathy Shelton, J. W., Homeopathy: How It Really Works, Prometheus, 2003. Hempel, S., The Medical Detective: John Snow, Cholera and the Mystery of the Broad Street Pump, Granta, 2007. Ernst, E., ‘Evaluation of homeopathy in Nazi Germany’, Br Homeopath J 1995; 84:229. Maddox
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Image/Science Photo Library Archie Cochrane © Cardiff University Library, Cochrane Archive, Llandough Hospital Samuel Hahnemann © Science Photo Library Oliver Wendell Holmes © Wellcome Library, London John Snow’s map of cholera deaths in Soho, 1854 © Royal Society of Medicine Cervical spine © Sheila Terry/Science Photo Library Daniel David Palmer © Science Photo Library Field thistle © Wellcome
Numbers Rule Your World: The Hidden Influence of Probability and Statistics on Everything You Do
by Kaiser Fung · 25 Jan 2010 · 227pp · 62,177 words
popularly believed to be “miasma,” also known as foul air. In a series of inspired studies, Dr. John Snow demonstrated that cholera is spread by foul water, not foul air. By mapping sites of water pumps and homes of the deceased, he guessed correctly that the Broad Street pump was infected. Folklore had it
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shoe with a hole, symbolizing the sweat and toil involved in their surveillance activities. In Langmuir’s office hung the portraits of his three heroes: John Snow (of course), Sir Edwin Chadwick, and Charles Chapin. Chadwick, like Snow, was instrumental in jump-starting sanitation reform in England in the nineteenth century; he
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practice, to prove DeWaal’s claim of many lives saved. The same kind of conundrum was recognized over a century ago by John Snow, who considered the possibility that “the [cholera] attacks had so far diminished before the use of the water was stopped that it was impossible to decide whether the well
The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance
by Laurie Garrett · 31 Oct 1994 · 1,293pp · 357,735 words
cholera and other epidemic diseases—including tuberculosis—took their greatest toll among the most impoverished residents of the world’s metropolises seemed only to reinforce the belief by those in power from Moscow to Madrid that lower-class “immorality” was the root of disease. During London’s devastating 1849 cholera epidemic, physician John Snow
Wasteland: The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, and Why It Matters
by Oliver Franklin-Wallis · 21 Jun 2023 · 309pp · 121,279 words
week. Inevitably, the scientific establishment blamed miasma, and ignored any evidence that the Thames might be poisoning the city. In 1848, the noted physician John Snow traced a cholera outbreak in Soho that had claimed more than 600 lives back to a water pump on Broad Street. The well it drew from, it
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Bazalgette’s sewers, which were finished the following year. The Whitechapel tragedy was vindication of London’s sewer project, and a posthumous redemption for John Snow, whose theory of cholera as a water-borne disease was finally accepted by the medical establishment. In 2018, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Westminster
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waste 47, 84, 215 Smith, Jamie 2–3, 11, 14, 42, 277, 335 Snow, John 150–1, 155–6; On the Mode of Communication of Cholera 150–1 Society of the Plastics Industry 53, 54, 59, 64 soil 3, 19n, 20, 26, 33, 35, 37, 40, 41, 81, 90, 99, 105
Mapmatics: How We Navigate the World Through Numbers
by Paulina Rowinska · 5 Jun 2024 · 361pp · 100,834 words
appeared in places that smelled terrible. Places like nineteenth-century London. A young doctor by the name of John Snow first encountered cholera as a nineteen-year-old apprentice sent to treat the sick in a mining village close to Newcastle. There he meticulously documented his stay and
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observation proved only a correlation between water suppliers and cholera death rates; to prove causation, he needed more evidence. FIGURE 7.1: Areas of London supplied by two water companies, from the second edition of On the Mode of Communication of Cholera by John Snow. Water provided by the Lambeth Waterworks Company corresponded to
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this overlapping area, he’d have strong evidence that cholera spread through contaminated water. So, when cholera struck again in July 1854, he started knocking on some doors. FIGURE 7.2: The famous map of cholera deaths (black squares) during the 1854 London outbreak, based on John Snow’s data. The pump on Broad Street (circled
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worst epidemics Soho had ever seen. A hero or a storyteller? Books, journals and even medical textbooks have perpetuated the myth of John Snow the hero who single-handedly stopped the cholera epidemic. He has his society, based at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine,* which organizes annual Pumphandle Lectures and
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famous pump (without the handle) in the original location. A short walk from the pump, thirsty lecture audiences can have a pint in the historical John Snow pub. Almost two centuries after his research, Snow is still celebrated. But he has also had a lot of critics, both among his contemporaries and
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valuable. Even if he didn’t have any impact on the epidemic, his understanding that cholera spreads through water contributed to future improvements in sanitation. Though typically presented as the lonely campaigner against miasma theory, John Snow wasn’t the only person to suggest water as the mode of disease spread. His contemporary
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evidence against alternative ideas rather than in favour of the researcher’s theory that science pushes forward. Why have I written at such length about John Snow despite all these criticisms, I hear you ask? Although his work wasn’t flawless and he didn’t do it all alone, in my
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‘you and I’, and not a handful of scientists in a lab. We should all raise a glass to the imperfect but fascinating John Snow and his map! Beyond cholera Today, maps and mathematics are indispensable tools for fighting and preventing diseases, from local outbreaks to global pandemics. Scientists combine modern technologies from GPS to
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/mapping/something-in-the-water-the-mythology-of-snows-map-of-cholera/. Johnson, Steven. The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. New
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Spreading in the Data Science Age. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2019. Snow, John. On the Mode of Communication of Cholera, 2nd ed. London: John Churchill, 1855. Geographic Profiling Chainey, Spencer, and Lisa Tompson, eds. Crime Mapping Case Studies: Practice and Research. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 2008. Rossmo, D. Kim. Geographic Profiling.
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institutions providing accommodation and (enforced) employment for the poor. * In case you’re interested, life membership costs £15 plus the price of shipping the special John Snow mug. * An arc minute is equal to 1/60 of a degree of latitude or longitude. * More precisely, a rectangular grid is overlaid on the
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ecass.eu/european-guidelines/. 7. Found In 1831, cholera arrived in England: Max Roser et al., ‘Eradication of Diseases’, Our World in Data, June 2014, rev. October 2018, https://ourworldindata.org/eradication-of-diseases. it leads to death, often within hours: Miriam Reid, ‘John Snow Hunts the Blue Death’, Distillations, Science History Institute
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, Philadelphia, 8 March 2022, https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/john-snow-hunts-the-blue-death. a mining village close to Newcastle: Reid, ‘John Snow Hunts’. instead of ingesting poison: John Snow, On the Mode of Communication of Cholera (London: John Churchill, 1849), 6
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Street Pump – Epidemiology Begins!’, part 2, Extra History YouTube channel, 21 November 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jlsyucUwpo&list=PLhyKYa0YJ_5Aq7g4bil7bnGi0A8gTsawu&index=52. only 37 by the latter?: John Snow, On the Mode
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), 75. in most cases, without their knowledge: Snow, On the Mode of Communication of Cholera (1855), 75. Golden Square in central London’s Soho: Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic – and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World (New York: Riverhead Books,
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Soon, Soho was cholera-free: Underwood, ‘History of Cholera’. trying to understand what had happened: Johnson, Ghost Map, 163. where the contaminant of the Broad Street pump came from: Johnson, Ghost Map, 172–81. gotten the symptoms around 28 August: Johnson, Ghost Map, 177. in the original location: ‘Welcome to the John Snow Society’, The John Snow Society, London
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December 2022, https://johnsnowsociety.org/#The-Society. among his contemporaries and even today: Tom Koch and Kenneth Denike, ‘Crediting His Critics’ Concerns: Remaking John Snow’s Map of Broad Street Cholera, 1854’, Social Science and Medicine 69, no. 8 (October 2009): 1246–51, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2009.07.046. future
Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia
by Anthony M. Townsend · 29 Sep 2013 · 464pp · 127,283 words
in new technology and design ideas, it has created a framework on which per-poor innovation can happen. Mapping has tremendous power to improve the slums of the developing world. John Snow’s map of cholera deaths in 1850s London recast the public understanding of slum conditions, and spurred reforms that eventually rid the city
Heart: A History
by Sandeep Jauhar · 17 Sep 2018 · 272pp · 78,876 words
. Epidemiology is about the ecology of disease: where and when it is found, or not. In 1854, John Snow, physician to Queen Victoria, performed the world’s first epidemiological study when he investigated a major cholera outbreak in London’s Soho. Snow was born in the town of York, at the intersection of
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–42. Oppenheimer, Gerald M. “Becoming the Framingham Study, 1947–1950.” American Journal of Public Health 95, no. 4 (2005): 602–10. Ramsay, Michael A. E. “John Snow, MD: Anaesthetist to the Queen of England and Pioneer Epidemiologist.” Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings 19, no. 1 (2006): 24. Sterling, Peter. “Principles of Allostasis
10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness
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to 20 litres per day, all of which was dumped in the cesspits beneath Soho’s cramped houses. The disease was cholera, and it killed people in their hundreds. Dr John Snow, a British doctor, was sceptical of the miasma theory, and had spent some years looking for an alternative explanation. From previous
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the water supply. It was the first-ever epidemiological study – that is, it used the distribution and patterns of a disease to understand its source. John Snow went on to use chlorine to disinfect the water supplying the Broad Street pump, and his chlorination methods were quickly put to use elsewhere. As
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of infectious disease has all but gone, our immune systems are still under fire. But why? Let’s turn to the technique pioneered by Dr John Snow during Soho’s cholera outbreak of 1854: epidemiology. Since Snow first applied logic and evidence to unravelling the mystery of the source of
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us with clues that can help us to answer the overall question: Why are twenty-first-century illnesses happening? The map of cholera cases that John Snow produced in answer to Where? gave away cholera’s likely epicentre – the Broad Street pump. Without much detective work, it’s clear to see that obesity, autism, allergies
Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water
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illness in its service area. In a now legendary 1854 experiment, Dr. John Snow, a London physician, conducted a simple yet brilliant test that helped to settle the debate about the transmission of cholera. Snow drew a map of a virulent cholera outbreak in one of the poorest neighborhoods of London—an area served by
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