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 made signal contributions to the establishment of anesthesia as a distinct field in medical science and practice. He was also a pioneer in the application of medical statistics to the resolution of epidemiological problems, and an innovative contributor to medical cartography.

"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." "Additional Bibliography" contains extracts from published writings that mention Snow. "Other Web Sites" only has a limited number of URLs, due to the enhanced search capabilities of current online browsers.

The website 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 created during the writing process, and a list of initial reviews. We will post errata pages, with corrections and occasional revised wording, as soon as we select a suitable format for presenting them.

(2) Investigating Cholera in Broad Street is a book of curated 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 the massive 1854 cholera outbreak in north London. The Online Companion to this book 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 static site generation and markdown which 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 searchable through the online Document Search; this search feature is case and punctuation specific.

The website is co-managed by Peter Vinten-Johansen (vintenjo@msu.edu) for content, and Erika Brenton for website development.

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