John Snow, Asiatic Cholera and the inductive-deductive method - republished

Introduction to the John Snow Course and Lecture 1

This is the first of a series of posts telling the story of Dr John Snow, a pioneer anaesthetist and epidemiologist.

After a brief biographical sketch, we shall follow Snow in his investigation of the mode of transmission of cholera in Victorian London, his premature death and the near oblivion to which his work was consigned for over 50 years, and its eventual rediscovery and re-publication by the American epidemiologist Wade Hampton Frost. 

We will follow the evolution of the cholera pandemics of 1848-49 and 1854 and give some health-political background to the events surrounding them.

This series is designed as an instructional course with a series of 18 posts (numbered 2 to 19) structured into Snow’s seven lessons:

• Snow’s review of what was known of the outbreaks and the main theories of communication of cholera prevalent in Snow’s time

• Snow’s theory

• Evidence for a propagated source of the epidemic

• Evidence for a point source of the epidemic

• Snow’s assessment of alternative explanations …