John Snow, Asiatic Cholera and the inductive-deductive method

Lecture 14: the importance of the outlier

Snow’s theory and his work were contrary to the prevailing miasma theory. He was not short of critics, but he managed to turn the criticisms to his own advantage.

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In the last weeks we discussed the Broad Street outbreak and some of objection moved to Snow’s work by his contemporaries (URL).  In today’s post, we will discuss the importance of the outlier in epidemiology, and on Thursday, we will learn about Snow’s further dismissal of alternative explanation for his findings.