John Snow Cholera Essay

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As a young boy, John Snow envisioned himself becoming a physician at the young age of fourteen. His parents seen how intelligent and eager of a student he was, so they decided to send him to a private school. Due to his excelled abilities in looking at details, he was able to get an apprenticeship. Dr. William Hardcastle took interest in him due to his analytical mind, and gave him the opportunity to become his apprentice. During his apprenticeship in 1831 at the age of only eighteen, an epidemic of cholera hit London. This epidemic was not new to the European continent it had already claimed hundreds of thousands of lives already. Being unable to see all the patients personally Dr. Harcastle decided to send Snow to Killingworth Colliery to …show more content…

degree. As a practicing physician, he became well known for his scientific studies about the effects of anesthetics. After many tests performed with the precise amount of chloroform and ether, he was able to make it safer and more effective for surgeons. Since surgeons were using handkerchiefs soaked in chloroform to be able them to perform surgeries on their patients at the risk of killing them to putting them to sleep. Doing much research and thinking Snow came to the conclusion that many contagious diseases might possibly caused by microscopic parasites. Other physicians of this time felt like the cholera outbreak was due to poisonous gas that was secreted from organic decay, they referred to this gas as miasmas. The source of this gas was being produced by garbage pits, swamps, open graves and sewers. Although Snow had another opinion about the miasmas and did not feel like it explained the spread of certain diseases, especially cholera. Snow recalled back to the time Dr. Hardcastle had sent him to take care of the miners that he could not attend to because of the outbreak. When tending to these miners he noticed that they working underground where there were no sewers but also no water for proper hand washing amongst the miners. September 1848 another outbreak of cholera hit London, and the age if thirty-five Snow had the opportunity to track the transmission of the disease. The

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