John Snow





The British physician John Snow (1813 - 1858) was a leader in the adoption
of anaesthesia and medical hygiene, and a pioneer of epidemiology. He was
voted in a poll of British doctors in 2003 as the greatest doctor of all time.

Snow was a believer in the germ theory of cholera, as opposed to the
then-dominant miasma theory. He was the author of the study of an 1854
outbreak of cholera in London's Soho district. According to an apocryphal
story, he mapped and identified the cause of the outbreak as the public
water pump on Broad Street, and disabled it, thus ending the outbreak.
Whether or not the story of the pump is true, the study was a major event in
the history of public health, and can be regarded as the founding event of
the science of epidemiology.

There is still a water pump on Broad Street, opposite what is now the John
Snow public house. However, it is non-functional, and exists only as a
memorial to John Snow.