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Public Health Rises… Again
What? You thought that all the kowtowing to elected politicians by public health leadership meant the end of Public Health? Dear child, it’s only the beginning.
*Fade in from black*
What’s past is prologue
The year is 1854, a hot summer in London. People living in the Soho suburb are being hit hard by a cholera epidemic. This is a time when the prevailing theory of disease was that disease was carried through a miasma, a “bad air” that emanated from rotting things like carcasses and corpses. It was believed that cholera was acquired through inhalation of those miasmas from sewage. Little did the people know that the germ could be in their drinking water.
A physician named John Snow was interested in studying the spread of the disease, so he traveled to different towns and took down notes on who was getting sick, where, and when. He took notes in Soho on the residence of the cases of cholera, and of the places where cholera didn’t strike. He noticed patterns of the disease and used the scientific method to rule out all possibilities until one became clear: whatever was causing cholera was in the water at Broad Street.
