Epidemiology According to John Snow and William Farr Research Paper

Epidemiology According to John Snow and William Farr - Research Paper Example When the second cholera pandemic broke out and reached London in 1832, a number of theories on the causation of such catastrophic spate were proposed, including miasma or â€Å"bad air† and changes in environmental conditions (Morabia, 2001, 150th Anniversary, 2004). However, John Snow, who was a respected medical practitioner specializing in anesthesia and respiratory physiology, questioned the correctness of those theories. He observed that the symptoms were intestinal in nature, abdominal pain is one of the first complaints of the afflicted, accompanied by vomiting, diarrhea, and dehydration (Eyler, 2001). At the same time, treatments that acted specifically in the digestive tract seemed to alleviate early symptoms. From these observations, he proposed that cholera could not be a blood or respiratory infection but an infection of the gut. Snow proposed that the main proponent of transmission was not the soil, nor climate change or miasma as originally suggested, but the ing estion of water contaminated with fecal matter. But this did not convince the medical community. Without definitive data, Snow’s analogy was not good enough. In 1854, another wave of cholera plagued the Soho district yet again. This time, Snow suspected that an infected water pump located in Broad Street brought upon the outbreak. Following his earlier proposal that the cholera infection was from the ingestion of contaminated water and bearing a record of death from Cholera from the General Register Office, he traced the deaths attributed to cholera within the vicinity and found that they drank water from a common water pump in Broad Street. Snow elucidated this by plotting a Cholera spot map showing the areas collectively affected by the epidemic, as well as its proximity to the specific pump in question.