Social science & medicine
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Social science & medicine · Apr 2000
Biography Historical ArticleOur sense of Snow: the myth of John Snow in medical geography.
In 1854, Dr. John Snow identified the Broad Street pump as the source of an intense cholera outbreak by plotting the location of cholera deaths on a dot-map. He had the pump handle removed and the outbreak ended...or so one version of the story goes. ⋯ The map that accompanies his text shows cholera deaths in Golden Square (the subdistrict of London's Soho district where the outbreak occurred) from August 19 to September 30, a period much longer than the intense outbreak. What happens to the meaning of the myth when the causal connection between the pump's disengagement and the end of the outbreak is examined? Snow's data and text do not support this link but show that the number of cholera deaths was abating before the handle was removed. With the drama of the pump handle being questioned and the map, our artifact, occupying a more illustrative than central role, what is our sense of Snow?