Dr Snow and the Water

 Long before "You know nothing, Jon Snow" became a meme, there was another John Snow, a doctor, whose battle against ignorance and mere lore has changed the way we see the world.

Throughout history, the predominating belief has been that sickness and plague were either sent from God as a punishment, or caused by something in the atmosphere. 'Malaria' is Italian for 'bad air' and the same term in Greek 'miasma' was the explanation given to contagious disease by Galen around the year 200 AD. 

Keep reading, we get to Opensim if you're patient.

It may seem unbelievable, but for almost 2000 years, right up into the Victorian era, people continued to put their faith in the miasma theory of how sickness spreads. Not everyone thought so, of course; pioneering physicians and early scientists  propounded 'germ theory' (germ is the the Greek word for seed or spore) first in the 1500s and later in the 1700s, but it never got much traction. 'Miasma' made more sense as the explanation for the diseases that hit hard in places where the poor lived in stuffy, stinky, cramped conditions. It was just bad air that was at fault.

NPC John Snow on Epidemiology, Avacon grid, and a couple of RL photos of the man.

John Snow set out to prove this wrong. In 1844, when he was 31 years old, Dr. Snow set up practice in London's Soho district, a melting pot of breweries, brothels, slaughterhouses, theater people, refugees, and penurious local tradesmen and women. Most people got water in buckets and bottles from the nearest public pump, which served for drinking, washing, and any other uses.  A few could afford to have fresh water piped to into their homes by a private firm, but everyone almost certainly had a cess pit for sewage and other household waste.

Broad Street

In the summer of 1854 deadly cholera struck the area of Soho around Broad Street, killing over a hundred people in just three days, with many more sick and dying. Dr. John Snow treated a lot of these people, and became convinced that the illness was being caused by something other than smells and sins. His research led him to suspect one particular public water supply, the Broad Street pump, of being the point of origin of the cholera. 

This map shows all the cholera deaths Dr Snow verified in the Soho district,
each marked as a black line. The pump that spread the illness is in the center.

The research he had to do was asking questions, being a detective in a way. Talking to all kinds of people, young and old. Sifting the facts out of the often vague answers he got from the local people. And putting the data together in a scientific way. His method worked. 

You literally have to pump the local residents for information
on Epidemiology

To read a full account of this giant leap forward for medicine and for modern living conditions, you can read John Snow's own account of it here: "On the Mode of Communication of Cholera"

Questioning a Victorian urchin

Thanks to his scientific approach to the data, he was able in the end to convince the local authorities to remove the handle from the Broad Street pump, so that people couldn't get their water from that contaminated well any more. The cholera outbreak disappeared.

This important story of mystery, history, and science is brought to life on a build put together by Kim Anubis and Stephen Gasior, inworld known as Stephen Xootfly. Told you we'd get to Opensim in the end.

The region Epidemiology on Avacon (HG Address at the end of the post) is a place where students and interested amateurs alike can test their detective skills by asking questions of the many NPC residents along Broad Street and adjacent tenements. At the arrival point, pick up the tools you'll need to complete the task of proving what you suspect - it's something in the water.

Trouble brewing on Epidemiology

For example, here's Stephen interrogating a man who works at the local brewery where no cases seem to have been reported. The men there weren't richer or cleaner than other locals, so why would that be? And another man, seriously ill inside his very simple and not very sanitary house - can he supply some solid evidence about what happened?

To make things a bit quicker and easier, students use a HUD to greet people, and ask them some standard questions, and the NPCs respond with little bits of information and local color, like this:

Mrs. G: Oh, a doctor! What good tidings. What brings you by, Dr. Thirza? I am suffering so greatly from miasmic cholera the past few days.

Samuel Carlson: Greetings, Thirza. Looking to buy some jewelry? Let me grab a sample from inside.

George Moore: You look like a thirsty professional,Thirza. Care to come inside and get a drink or some sherbet?

Samuel Carlson: How is your day so far, Thirza? I've got plenty of fine jewelry for your inspection.

He really wants to offload that jewelry. NPC figures such as Professor Klein, C. Ash, and the disreputable looking Bob Draper are present on the sim, students can interact with them - the idea is that they do their own detective work to figure out - to prove - what's causing people to get sick and die here.

Some may recall we had a Safari to this region a long while back, on a grid no longer in operation, so it's wonderful to know that Stephen has been able to revive it, and update parts also, for our entertainment and also, it's to be hoped, as a learning tool for RL educational purposes. 

HG Address: grid.avacon.org:8002:Epidemiology

For a time, there's also a John Snow display at OSfest hop://grid.opensimfest.com:8022/OSF_N_Expo/218/198/22