John Snow, Asiatic Cholera and the inductive-deductive method

Lecture 15: eliminating alternative explanations

In this lecture, we examine the main objections and alternative explanations for Snow’s findings and show how he dealt with them. Let’s start with miasmata.

The 1855 General Health Board (GHB) report on the Golden Square outbreak (see Lecture 18) contained this paragraph written by Dr Fraser and colleagues on page 162:

So it was effluvia which caused the …