1813 - 1858

John Snow was born in York on 15th March 1813, the eldest son of a farmer. He was educated at a private school in York until he was fourteen, after which he was apprenticed to William Hardcastle, a surgeon living at Newcastle-on-Tyne. During his apprenticeship he became a vegetarian and total abstainer. For a short time he served as a colliery surgeon and unqualified assistant during the cholera epidemic of 1831-2. In October 1836 he enrolled as a student at the Hunterian school of medicine in Great Windmill Street, London. The following October he began to attend the medical practice at the Westminster Hospital, and in October 1838 became a licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries, having been admitted a member of the Royal College of Surgeons of England on 2nd May 1838. He graduated M.D. of the University of London on 20th December 1844, and in 1850 was admitted a licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians.

He regularly attended the meetings of the Westminster Medical Society, where, on 16th October 1841, he read a paper on "Asphyxia and on the Resuscitation of New-born Children." In 1852 the society, which afterwards became the Medical Society of London, selected him orator for the ensuing year, and on 10th March 1855 he was inducted into the president's chair. He acted for a short time as lecturer on forensic medicine at the Aldersgate Street School of Medicine, an appointment that lapsed when the school came to an end in 1849.

Snow held strong to his belief that cholera is communicated by means of a contaminated water supply, and in 1849 his essay on the mode of communication of cholera was first published, for which the Institute of France awarded him a monetary prize. In 1855, a second edition was published, with a much more elaborate investigation into the effect of the water supply on certain districts of South London in the epidemic of 1854.

In 1846, Snow's interest turned to the properties of ether, newly adopted in America as an anaesthetising agent. He made great improvements in the method of administering the drug, and then obtained permission to demonstrate his results in the dental outpatient’s room at St. George's Hospital. These proved to be so satisfactory that he subsequently became almost entirely responsible for the ether practice in London. Although he had practically introduced the scientific use of ether into English surgery, Snow also appreciated the value of other anaesthetising agents, particularly chloroform. This latter drug he administered to Queen Victoria on 7th April 1853, during the birth of Prince Leopold, and then again on 14th April 1857, at the birth of Princess Beatrice.

Snow never married and after his death on 16th June 1858, he was buried in the Brompton cemetery.

In the 20th Century, sanitary improvements largely eliminated cholera from industrialised countries, but as stated at the beginning of this article, it remains endemic in many areas of the world. After the Peruvian outbreak in 1991, Central and South America saw more than one million cases and eleven thousand deaths through 1995, and the disease also continues to produce significant morbidity and mortality in Africa and Asia.

Acknowledgements:

Broad Street Pump Outbreak

Biography of John Snow

History of Cholera

Dr John Snow Case Study