ABSTRACT
The elucidation of ill-health, disease, and death through spatial analysis has a long history. Most accounts start with Dr John Snow and the London cholera epidemic of 1854: Snow showed cholera deaths to be clustered around a particular water pump in Broad Street, Soho; removing the pump handle ended the epidemic. However, while effective in this particular episode, Snow’s analysis failed to overturn the prevailing miasmic theory that illness was caused by ‘bad air’. Snow’s map provided no direct evidence that the germs he blamed for the deaths even existed, while the sanitary improvements urged by the leading proponents of the miasmic theory, such as Florence Nightingale and William Farr, were highly and generally effective. The miasmic theory was only supplanted by the germ theory following Pasteur’s work in the 1860s, directly demonstrating the existence of micro-organisms (Gilbert, 2004, especially part 2).
