book background

About John Snow



Image
John Snow, age 33. Portrait by Thomas Jones Barker, courtesy of Geoffrey Snow; black-and-white reproduction supplied by David Zuck.

John Snow (1813–1858) made anesthesia scientific by showing how the human body responded to different doses of anesthetic drugs and how anesthesia affected the human physiology. In addition, Snow the practicing anesthetist is widely known for the inhalers he designed and for administering chloroform to Queen Victoria during the delivery of two of her children.

Snow was a founding member of the Epidemiological Society of London and, like many of his colleagues in that society, an exemplar of the notion that physicians should apply their expertise toward the amelioration of public health problems. During the second London cholera epidemic of 1848–49, Snow proposed the unconventional notion that the dread disease was caused by a particle that was ingested orally, rather than by a befouled component of miasmatic air. Then, during the cholera epidemic of 1853–54, he conducted two investigations that others would cite after his death as conclusively supporting his theory that cholera could be spread by sewage–contaminated water: A comparison of mortality in South London districts supplied by the Lambeth and Southwark & Vauxhall water companies; and a hypothesis that choleraic contamination of the Broad Street pump caused the sudden, massive outbreak in St. James, Westminster and St. Anne, Soho.

John Snow was the oldest child of a laboring–class family in York. His father eventually became a farmer and landlord, with sufficient property value to make him eligible to vote after the first Reform Bill of 1832. Snow became an apprentice at the age of fourteen to a surgeon–apothecary in Newcastle for six years. Thereafter, he served as an uncertified assistant apothecary for a year in rural Durham and two years in rural West Yorkshire. In the late summer of 1836, he walked from York to London, via Liverpool, Wales, and Bath. He attended lectures at the Hunterian School of Medicine and "walked the wards" at the Westminster Hospital. He qualified as a surgeon and as an apothecary in 1838, as a physician in 1844. He lived and practiced in metropolitan London until his death in 1858.

During his apprenticeship, he converted to vegetarianism. The book that prompted him to adopt that diet stressed the disease–causing properties of impure water; in his late teens, Snow became a pure-water sanitarian and would distill his own drinking water for the rest of his life. In the early 1830s, he took the pledge to advance temperance, a cause in which he was joined by several family members.

Snow's life and work are gateways into the social and intellectual history of medicine, particularly that of England during the early and middle years of the nineteenth century in the areas of general medical practice, clinical anesthesia, the control of infectious diseases, public health and sanitation.

Documents and Images related to Snow are accessible via the sub-navigation menu in the left column.

bottom of book image