Yesterday I gave a nod to an important epidemiologist, the late Alice Stewart. I’m old enough to have known her, but not old enough to know the most famous epidemiologist of all — indeed sometimes called the “Father of Epidemiology” — Dr. John Snow. Snow is also claimed as the “Father of Anesthesiology” because he administered chloroform to Queen Victoria during the births of her second and third children, thus popularizing the practice in the mid 19th century. Neither epidemiologists nor anesthesiologists seem to be aware that their dad had two families, but that’s another issue. The significance of Snow’s pioneering studies on cholera weren’t generally recognized until the 1930s, but since, his studies have become icons for epidemiology’s preventive role in public health. In fact our sister public health blog, The Pump Handle, is named after the claim that a cholera epidemic traced by Snow to water from a pump in Golden Square, London, was stopped by the simple expedient of taking the handle off the pump. Evidence is that the epidemic was already on the way out by the time the handle was taken off the pump, but ever since, “taking the handle off the pump” has been a public health metaphor for disease prevention.
A recent book, The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson, sets out the story in engrossing detail. Here’s a short talk by Johnson that tells a small bit of it at a TED talk in 2006: