Summary: Thanks to his mother's support, John Snow rose from humble beginnings as a coal miner's son and apprenticed to a doctor in Newcastle. As a young man, he treated many patients during the cholera epidemic that struck Newcastle. He noticed that the traditional explanation for cholera's spread - miasma from graveyards and swamps - could not explain its appearance in Newcastle where he treated patients.

Summary: John Snow's single case study was not enough to convince the medical community that cholera was spread through the water, but he did not give up. He founded the Epidemiological Society of London in 1850, the first organization dedicated to studying not just cures for disease, but also their causes.

Summary: John Snow raced to discover the causes of the cholera epidemic that swept Broad Street. He went door-to-door talking to the locals, then surveyed government records for extra clues. He began to craft a map of deaths, and drew the first Voronoi Diagram to assess the victims' proximity to the pump.

Summary: John Snow's report on the causes of cholera provided yet more evidence of the dangers of filthy cities. Cities had always been unhealthy places to live, generally with a higher death rate than birth rate, but fixing them just wasn't the focus of an agricultural world economy.

Summary: This was a short series, but we still want to set the record straight: correct our mistakes, elaborate on stories we left out, and reflect on what we've learned! One of the recurring themes of the Broad Street Pump series was people's continued resistance to John Snow's theories, even when he collected evidence to back them. But in the end, the truth won out: the march of progress can be very slow, since individual people cling to what they know and what feels most comfortable to them, but in the course of time, we do come to accept the truth. What seemed so unbelievable back then is common knowledge now. John Snow's struggles may have seemed futile at the time, and he watched himself dismissed at every turn, but his efforts added up to the foundation of epidemiology and contributed to the acceptance of germ theory.

Summary: Music Video