John Snow was an English physician, born in 1813, who is considered the father of epidemiology. He traced a cholera outbreak in London in 1854 to a specific water source and convinced the local council to remove the water pump’s handle.
The people who passed for scientists in John Snow’s day believed that people got cholera from other people or from “miasmas,” scientific jargon for bad air. So during cholera outbreaks, many governments imposed quarantines and cordon sanitaires that “cramp(s) commerce and cause(s) vast expense.” They were more limited geographically than today’s lockdowns but nonetheless often led to a “state of confusion, bordering on anarchy” where they were imposed.
John Snow noticed that cholera victims all initially presented with tummy problems, not breathing issues, which suggested that they ingested, rather than inhaled, something untoward. In 1849, he published a paper, “On the Mode of Communication of Cholera,” which argued that bad water, not bad air, caused cholera.
Thomas Davis had made the same claim in 1832, but nobody in power wanted to hear that London’s sewage system had to be modernized and enlarged. But Snow kept collecting data like any good scientist would. It turned out that the Londoners who got their water from a company that pumped it out from a part of the Thames visibly contaminated with sewage were an order of magnitude more likely to die of cholera (315 vs. 59 per 10,000) than those who got their water elsewhere.
That’s a smoking sewer pipe if there ever was one, right? But no, “the scientists” needed more proof. They got their water from safe sources and had published articles and books that blamed cholera on miasmas and other quackeries and didn’t really care about the poor Londoners drinking dangerous water. Ironically, one major voice of establishment scepticism was The Lancet, the very outlet in modern times now pushing the John Snow Memorandum. Back then it implied, in the gentlemanly style of the day, that Snow was not a real scientist and that his words bordered on treason!
The John Snow Memorandum seeks to counter the Great Barrington Declaration, which has made waves globally by suggesting that general lockdowns cause more deaths than they prevent.
https://www.aier.org/article/john-snow-vs-the-john-snow-memorandum/
Despite opposition, Snow pressed on, discovering during an 1854 outbreak that most of the sick people got their water from a single well while others who lived and worked nearby — and hence breathed the same air — were fine if they drew water from private sources. Snow even mapped it all out but there was nothing wrong with the well that anyone could see. Later, though, a baby with diarrhoea was identified as patient zero for that outbreak, which ended soon after the baby died and its mother stopped putting its faeces into a cesspool that leaked into the well that Snow had identified and convinced local leaders to shut down.
Snow contributed to epidemiological thinking by proposing a novel hypothesis for cholera transmission, testing the hypothesis by leveraging heterogeneity regarding water sources and outcomes, providing clear and compelling evidence for his case, and pushing for the lowest-cost effective intervention. Yet Snow conceded that removing the handle from the water pump was only an intermediate stopgap and that only the baby’s death removed the threat from the community.
Even after this triumph, public health officials and establishment outlets like The Lancet would not accept Snow’s theory, presumably in part because the faecal-to-mouth transmission method was too gross to contemplate. Although a teetotaler and vegetarian who boiled his own water, Snow died of a stroke at age 45. I suspect the stupidity and cupidity of those with whom he had to deal caused him to pop a vessel. Only after additional studies were conducted after his death was Snow’s theory finally accepted and widespread sanitary reforms implemented. Snow won but died, while The Lancet lost and lived on, and on, and on.
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