The Real Story of John Snow

[Music] these days most people are like me they hear the name John snow and they think of Game of Thrones or they think of that British news anchor but before there was John snow the news anchor and before there was John snow the fan beloved brother of the Nights Watch there was Jon Snow with an H the 19th century medical doctor from England but dr. Jon Snow has a few claims to fame including developing early anesthetics and administering anesthesia for the Queen while she delivered two of her kids but mostly he is remembered for the way he fought cholera in the 1850s his timely action and clever thinking stopped an outbreak and even though he was never recognized during his lifetime he's now considered one of the founders of Epidemiology our story begins in mid nineteenth century London which was in a word gross in two words similar gross like many cities in the eighteen hundred's London saw a huge increase in population and with that came a huge increase in poop which nobody knew quite how to deal with sewer systems hadn't quite spread to the entire city so in places like the Soho district people sloshed their waste into the streets dumped it into overflowing cesspools or trucked it over to the Thames river the river that notably also served as the city's primary water supply during this period maybe unsurprisingly London and the rest of Europe were also being plagued with persistent outbreaks of Cholera a highly infectious sometimes deadly diarrhea illness and there was considerable disagreement over why we didn't know that bacteria and new viruses were at the root of most infectious diseases so the prevailing idea was miasma theory which said that they were passed around by bad air this is where Jon Snow came in he had encountered cholera before in mining populations and had come to believe the disease was not spread by air but by ingesting stuff contaminated with human waste after all the miners brought their meals to work didn't have a bathroom down there and probably didn't wash their hands before eating gross when snow observed the situation in London he therefore concluded that cholera was being spread by tiny fecal particles in the water and in 1854 he got a chance to prove it the year before a new cholera outbreak reached a London borough near snows home and it killed more than 500 people in a matter of weeks saved on the area snow was suspicious of one water pump on Broad Street specifically after his sample of the water turned up visible white flecks of organic material so he obtained a list of some people who had been killed by the outbreak and began talking to their families and ultimately he found the common factor was where those victims had gotten their water that pump on Broad Street snow then took his evidence to the local officials who agreed to take the handle off the pump to prevent people from using it but even then nobody really believed snow about why including Britain's general Board of Health it's possible that his sample size wasn't enough to convince them or maybe it was the fact that he couldn't prove what in the water was causing the illness in any case snow was confident enough in his findings that when other cholera outbreaks appeared he continued trying to find the contaminated water behind them and ultimately that led him to a more citywide discovery at some point snow realized all the districts in London affected by the outbreaks had their water piped in from one of two suppliers one that got their water from upstream of London and one that got it from downstream he suspected the downstream water as you might also suspect had a bunch of sewage in it so cholera should have been more common in the neighbourhoods that drink it to prove this he began rifling through hundreds of parliamentary death Records and he found that areas with downstream water had 14 times more deaths from cholera during the outbreak now to you and to me that might seem like pretty conclusive evidence that sewage equals cholera but for various reasons the idea still didn't catch on and that was the end of that or at least it was snows last published attempt at convincing the medical community that sewage caused cholera he did continue to investigate it privately and do other kinds of research but unfortunately he died prematurely only a few years after these events is though snow was very right cholera is typically a waterborne illness spread by sewage contaminated water it just took a few more decades of work and proof that microbes can cause diseases for scientists to finally prove and accept that thankfully for all of us though snows methods didn't fade into obscurity even if his work was rejected in the 1850s his outbreak management strategies are still in use today his idea to map the origin of cases is a technique that is currently saving lives and it was so unique that it was a foundation of modern epidemiology looking back dr. John snow may not have had a sword he may not have had an army at his command but he did wield mass health information and helped shape a major field of science so even though snow wasn't celebrated during his lifetime there's a lot to celebrate about him today because in the end there's no doubting that his contributions have helped save millions of lives [Music]

Channel: SciShow

Views: 120,067

Rating: 4.9595513 out of 5

Keywords: SciShow, science, Hank, Green, education, learn, john snow, snow, epidemiology, cholera, quarantine, medicine, medical, health, infection, water

Id: _Uwwhudc-CQ

Length: 5min 40sec (340 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 10 2019