Conville & Walsh

In the opening decades of the nineteenth century, the British authorities nervously watched as cholera crossed Asia and India and spread into Europe. An incurable and baffling pandemic, top doctors across the world were powerless to halt its spread. Shortly after it jumped the sea from Hamburg to Sunderland in 1831, John Snow – a young apprentice doctor in Newcastle – found himself coping single-handedly with an outbreak at the Killingworth colliery. And while he watched men die where they fell at the coal-face, the first glimmer of a determination to beat this deadly invader was born.

It wasn’t until 1854, however, that John Snow realized how cholera was transmitted and, in so doing, earned his place in medical history as the father of epidemiology. Then working as a Soho doctor, he was at hand for the infamous Broad Street outbreak which killed hundreds of people in 48 hours; and it was Snow’s rigorous, pain-staking work that enabled him to be the first doctor ever to answer the who and how of the epidemiologist’s craft. And inside this, the world’s original medical detective story, is Snow’s own tale – of a determined outsider who rose from unremarkable roots to shake a pompous and self-satisfied medical establishment.