For the purpose of this assignment, I am Robert Shepway, I am a member of the special Sanitary Committee of the Board of Governors and Directors of the St. James Parish, during the time period of 1854.
In mid-1854, people in the vicinity of number 40 Broad Street were dying of cholera. John Snow investigated with some help from a local priest, and found the connecting factor in all the deaths in the area was the drinking of water from the Broad Street pump. The most significant finding, after Snow had mapped out the area around the pump, was that everyone inside the border he had drawn lived closer to the pump and everyone outside the border had some reason to draw water from it. Snow’s investigation was made possible by William Farr’s statistical work (Keegan).
Steven Johnson, in The Ghost Map, described the Board members as being skeptical, yet Snow’s argument was persuasive. If Snow were wrong, people would go thirsty for a few weeks. If he was right, lives could be saved. (Insert final vote…show more content… The action of airborne zymotic disease material could explain how epidemic diseases were able to move from place to place when no direct contact of sick and well could be discovered, and why the quarantine had not been effective against cholera. The modification of the power of zymotic material through meteorological variance, changes in its concentration, and the presence of other airborne organic material offered very plausible explanations for the great changes in time of the mortality of epidemic diseases and for the bizarre nature of the geographical distribution of their attack. Furthermore, the possibility of generating zymotic material from ordinary airborne filth provided an explanation for endemic disease phenomena and for the extraordinarily high mortality of the poorest, most crowded sections of industrial cities (Eyler
