Public Health Innovations of the 19th Century
“Snow’s work was constantly building bridges between different disciplines, some of which barely existed as functional sciences in his day, using data on one scale of investigation to make predictions about behavior on other scales”.
— Steven Johnson
It was in the 1850’s in London, England which at that time was a thriving center for trade and the arts. Many areas of the city were occupied by people who were very poor and were living in crowded conditions.
Parts of the city were very dirty, and diseases would occasionally surface and spread throughout the population and many people would die. One of these diseases was named cholera. The first symptom of cholera was queasiness, followed by stomachache, vomiting, and diarrhea so prolific that it caused victims to die of dehydration. Hundreds of people would die in a week and several thousands of people would die in a month. Cholera was reported to have killed hundreds of thousands of people on the European continent.
People in those days didn’t understand how infectious diseases were transmitted from one person to another. Cholera would show up and then go away. The people were extremely fearful of this disease and were afraid it would come back again and kill them. Below is an illustration from a satirical magazine called Punch. The message…
