This book features various accounts of a cholera outbreak in West London that killed over 500 people in ten days during the late summer of 1854. What had happened? Local authorities were flummoxed about the mode by which the disease had spread. What has become known as 'the Broad Street pump episode' is one of the most significant early examples of team-oriented investigations into the causes of epidemic disease - a hallmark of epidemiology and public health today. This collection includes documents from the five separate investigations into possible causes that were conducted. John Snow and Henry Whitehead made independent investigations. Inspectors from the General Board of Health and the Sewer Commission as well as a parish inquiry committee also scrutinized the outbreak. This volume traces competing notions of how this disease was communicated, starting with the first pandemic which reached England in 1831, and it documents how they developed over time.

The product of six years of collaborative research, this fine biography offers new interpretations of a pioneering figure in anaesthesiology, epidemiology, medical cartography, and public health. It modifies the conventional rags to riches portrait of John Snow by synthesising fresh information about his early life from archival research and recent studies.

It explores the intellectual roots of his commitments to vegetarianism, temperance, and pure drinking water, first developed when he was a medical apprentice and assistant in the north of England. The authors argue that all of Snow's later contributions are traceable to the medical paradigm he imbibed as a medical student in London and put into practice early in his career as a clinician: that medicine as a science required the incorporation of recent developments in its collateral sciences, chiefly anatomy, chemistry, and physiology, in order to understand the causes of disease.

Snow's theoretical breakthroughs in anaesthesia were extensions of his experimental research in respiratory physiology and the properties of inhaled gases. Shortly thereafter, his understanding of gas laws led him to reject miasmatic explanations for the spread of cholera, and to develop an alternative theory in consonance with what was then known about chemistry and the physiology of digestion.

Using all of Snow's writings, the authors follow him when working in his home laboratory, visiting patients throughout London, attending medical society meetings, and conducting studies during the cholera epidemics of 1849 and 1854. The result is a book that demythologises some overly heroic views of Snow by providing a fairer measure of his actual contributions. It will have an impact not only on the understanding of the man but also on the history of epidemiology and medical science.