Special Guest Blogger: John Snow

Cholera is a nasty disease and it was everywhere when i was growing up and thought someone should have done something about it, so i did.
I grew up in a poor neighbourhood and was very well-acquainted with the terrible sanitary conditions but drinking foul water didnt hinder my knack for grasping maths and got taken on as a a medical apprentice where i came across many ailments but one particular disease soon emerged constantly, Cholera, which was thought to have been an airborne disease at the time.
I sat and had a think about it one weekend and the common link was polluted water and unsanitary conditions but the older doctors refused to listen, insisting it was airborne and the disease went on uninterrupted whilst we argued about it until one outbreak in Soho killed 500 people in a small area.
I began asking around in the area and worked out that most of the victims had used a shared water supply from a pump but in the same street was a brewery and none of the workers had fallen ill and found that the workers drank a company beer allowance each day instead of drinking water and the brewery’s had its own separate supply from a well out the back.
I got the polluted pump closed down and then another outbreak in Deptford killed 90 people and again it turned out that the victims had all been using the same pump for their drinking water but the authorities were asking for evidence and i had to find a way to show that the sewage which was regularly dumped into the Thames was killing a large number of people who relied on the river as a water source and some water companies drew their water from the Thames downstream of the main sewage discharge.
I found that the rate of cholera fatalities in homes supplied by companies that drew their water from the Thames was a whopping 14 times the rate of those who used other sources and these results attracted the attention of the British government, who banned the collection of drinking water from anywhere downstream of the sewage discharge.
Amazingly many of my medical colleagues were unconvinced and editorials and letters in medical journals continued to advance the airborne theory, and ripped into my ideas of it being in the water supply.
But then something curious happened, my discovery motivated London to build a massive new sewer system that would carry all the wastewater out beyond the tide-line of the Thames and feeling kinda smug, while working in my office i suffered a stroke and died six days later.