First, by establishing a clear spatial … By seeing, visually, where the cholera deaths were clustered, Snow showed that the water from a pump on Broad Street was to blame. Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program The Shortest Distance Between You and Science, A project of NYU's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program. Visualizing his data allowed Snow to investigate abnormalities in the outbreak. Initial examination of the well failed to show any problems, casting doubt on Snow's conclusions, and the pump was reopened without incident. Other times, it takes on a more subtle form, discovered only through a combination of patience, knowledge, and determination. Snow suspected that those who lived or worked near the pump were the most likely to use the pump and thus, contract cholera. Authorities and leading medical practitioners were at a loss of ideas for how to solve this problem. However, some months later an associate of Snow's stumbled upon the records of an infant who had died of diarrhea at the very beginning of the outbreak. While some critique the mythology that surrounds the Snow story (which states that following his testimony, the handle of the pump believed to be the source of the disease was removed), Snow’s importance in the history of social mapping is profound. The map essentially represented each death as a bar, and you can see them in the smaller image above. John Snow’s story is just one of many in a cultural shift towards the empirical method and modern statistics. He studies cognitive and computational neuroscience, attempting to link higher-level theories of the mind with information processing in the brain. Zoom in until you can see the little hash marks at points along the streets. Famously, John Snow plotted the locations of the deaths on a map and found they clustered around a pump in Broad Street – he suggested that the pump be taken out of service – thus helping to end the epidemic. He found that the largest number of cholera cases were concentrated around the Broad Street water pump. His finding suggested that contaminated water, not “bad air”, was responsible for outbreaks. In other words, a house without any deaths means that the inhabitants of that house successfully avoided cholera, not that the house sits empty. Users can use GIS software such as ArcGIS or QGIS to load the geographic data and georeferenced maps to created their own John Snow cholera maps. Cholera had been a persistent problem in London, but it was unclear how it was transmitted from one person to another. In 1854 there was a massive cholera outbreak in Soho, London – in three days over 120 people died from the disease. Snow's mapping of the 1854 cholera epidemic has saved countless lives. Truth reveals itself to us in many different ways. Society lacked a way of quantifying information and letting the data speak for itself. Sometimes, it takes the form of an amazing revelation, an eye-catching explosion of color, or a terrifying act of nature. Perhaps most importantly, it was a lesson in letting the data speak for itself. The deaths at each address are indicated by the little horizontal lines, stacked up from the street like a pile of little corpses. Edward Tufte, a godfather of information display, analyzes this map in his 1997 book, Visual Explanations. These marks indicate the number of cholera cases at a particular address. He went on accumulating data, and he eventually displayed it on a map of the area, where the 13 sources from which residents drank were also marked. He went all over Soho, recording every death and talking to neighbors. Claims were often backed up by “common sense”. He used to write a science blog called This Is Your Brain On Awesome, though nowadays you can find his latest personal work at chrisholdgraf.com. Snow has made the map big enough to include the locations of the other water pumps in the vicinity, clearly showing a drop-off in cholera deaths where houses are nearer to a different pump. Turn the clock back a few hundred years, … He took an unbiased approach to collecting and interpreting data and tried to understand the geographic and cultural mechanisms at play without resorting to preconceived beliefs. In order to determine the true cause, Snow collected data on who was sick and where they lived. In his 1855 text On the Mode of Communication of Cholera, Snow included a rendition of his Broad Street map (though it seems not to have scanned in the Google books version). Theme by Garrett Gardner. Starting on August 31, 1854, an outbreak of cholera hit the London district called Soho. So Snow did something data journalists often do now: he mapped the cases. Sometimes, it takes the form of an amazing revelation, an eye-catching explosion of color, or a terrifying act of nature. He appeared to be wearing a form of Brigandine or Coat of plates. The file includes the georeferenced scan of John Snow’s map, shapefiles of the cholera death locations and pumps, and several color and grayscale OS map images. Truth reveals itself to us in many different ways. | Wikimedia Commons/John Snow. The map of cholera in Soho created by John Snow. John Snow’s well known cholera map is often cited as one of the earliest known examples of using geographic inquiry to understand a health epidemic although his famous dot map was actually created after the cholera epidemic to show disease clusters.

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