John Snow was a Victorian physician who helped to establish that cholera was spread by contaminated water (not bad air, as theory had it). He traced the source of a deadly cholera outbreak to one pump and was able to have it closed, ending the outbreak, despite deep resistance from the local authorities, who did not want to believe his theory. This was a massive event in public health and the founding event of the science of epidemiology. Snow was also an early pioneer of anaesthesia.
A dedicated scientist, the results of his work are still evident. He saved untold lives. This is his story.A&C Black (Bloomsbury), 2013.
Excerpt from Chapter One …
“1832, Killingworth, near Newcastle-Upon-Tyne.
“John, come quick – it’s me sister!” The boy was hurtling down the main road of Killingworth village. His voice echoed off the grey stone buildings and leaked up and out into the dusk, dissolving into an evening that was already filled with despair.
John Snow could hear the urgency in the boy’s cries. He picked up his medical bag quickly, but with a heavy heart. It was only his third day in the village, but he had already attended several patients with the disease that everyone was dreading.
“It’s the cholera, I know it is. Please, can you come and see, can you help us.” The boy, about nine years old, stood in front of John, bent over, hands on his knees, the words forced out between his panting breaths.
John recognised the boy; the previous day, he had tended to the boy’s father, whom he had diagnosed with cholera – and who had since suffered a painful and tormented death. “Let’s go,” he said with an upward nod, and the two of them walked briskly side-by-side back up the main street, without saying a word.
It was August 1832. John Snow was only nineteen years old, an apprentice doctor who was tending single-handedly to the five hundred or so inhabitants of the coal mining village of Killingworth. His master, William Hardcastle, was back in Newcastle upon Tyne, about ten kilometres to the south, where cholera had already claimed hundreds of lives in the past year. The disease had stalled in February, but it had recently begun claiming lives once again, in Newcastle and in Killingworth – so Hardcastle had no choice but to send John to Killingworth on his own. There were nine cases, and five deaths, from cholera in Killingworth in January and February – John was determined to give people the best care and treatment he could, to minimise the number of cases now that the disease had returned there.”
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