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.
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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.
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| 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.
