Welcome

This website features writings by John Snow and his Victorian London contemporaries about the early years of inhalation anesthesia and two mid–nineteenth century cholera epidemics.

"Snow's Works" is an online archive of transcriptions and PDFs of Snow's published writings—most of which appeared in medical journals—as well as a selection of his presentations and comments at medical society meetings between 1838 and his death in 1858. Additional documents and images about his life and work are posted in "About John Snow."

"Snow's Contemporaries" offers a selection of writings by others on anesthesia, epidemiology, and public health. The subsection, ether chronicles, contains medical journal entries on initial English experimentation with painless surgery, primarily from 1847.

Scholarly articles on Snow, Snow's contemporaries, and various complementary topics appear in the section on "Interpretive Studies." There are only a few book reviews and extracts posted in "Additional Bibliography" and a limited number of URLs to "Other Web Sites"; these two sub-sections are now essentially superseded by the enhanced search capabilities of online browsers.

This web site has two online companions:

(1) Cholera, Chloroform, and the Science of Medicine refers to the biography of John Snow (Oxford University Press, 2003) by Peter Vinten–Johansen, Howard Brody, Nigel Paneth, Stephen Rachman, and Michael Rip, with assistance from David Zuck. Subsections provide a genesis of this writing team, the book's unifying thesis, searchable text of the bibliography, downloadable JPEGs of all illustrations and maps, PDFs of research schemas during the writing process, and a list of reviews. A subsection on errata is under construction.

(2) Investigating Cholera in Broad Street is a supplement to a book of documents—selected, edited and annotated by Peter Vinten-Johansen—published by Broadview Press on 19 May 2020. The book features major theories of epidemic disease emerging from analyses of the 1848–49 cholera epidemic in the UK and multiple inquiries into the cause of a massive 1854 outbreak in north London. The online companion contains additional transcriptions and collateral material; PDFs and links to references cited in the book; and high-resolution PDFs of maps and other images reproduced in the book, plus some that are not.

The John Snow Archive and Research Companion now uses KORA, an Open Source, database driven, online digital repository that allows our researchers to ingest, manage, and deliver digital texts and their corresponding metadata. All the texts within Snow's Works, Snow's Contemporaries, Interpretive Studies, and the Bibliography section are displayed from KORA and searchable through the online Document Search; this search feature is case and punctuation specific.

Peter Vinten-Johansen (vintenjo@msu.edu) controls the content of the site.

KORA was created and is administered by MATRIX Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences.






About John Snow

Portrait of John Snow vertical line

Cholera, Chloroform, and the Science of Medicine

book cover vertical line

Snow's Works

Snow's Publications and Medical Society Presentations & Comments