What would John Snow make of epidemiology today?

[Northerner]

Today is the bicentenary of the birth of John Snow, the physician who worked out how cholera is transmitted. He's often called the father of epidemiology, but would he recognise the field today?

Head to Soho in London and you might find an epidemiologist or two on a pilgrimage to Broadwick Street and the memorial to John Snow. There you'll find a public water pump with its handle missing; a symbol of Snow's discovery that cholera was spread not through "bad air", but through contaminated water. Snow famously asked for the handle of the Broad Street (now Broadwick Street) pump to be removed, after he mapped local cases of cholera and determined that water from it was the most likely source of the outbreak.

Despite sounding like the study of skin problems, epidemiology actually investigates patterns in population health (the word is related to "epidemic" rather than "epidermis"). The two tools you need for this kind of research are large samples of people, and statistics. Snow collected his data himself, going from door to door to find out whether the households where cholera struck had collected their drinking water from the Broad Street pump.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/s...3/mar/15/john-snow-epidemiology-today-cholera

 

[mcdonagh47]

Snow's work was based on the map produced in Manchester during the 1833 cholera outbreak by a doctor called Gaulter. Gaulter mapped all the cases street by steet and was baffled by the pattern with some houses having cholera while next door there was none. He had the answer in his hands, cudgelled his brains about what factors lay behind the pattern but failed to consider water and where people were getting it from.
His map was published without any answers to the pattern.
Snow made a similar map during the 1848 outbreak in Soho and clicked about the water.
The actual bacillus causing cholera wasn't identified until the 1890s however.