Culture
Happy 200th Birthday to a Mapmaker Who Changed the World
John Snow mapped out cases of cholera during an infamous 1854 outbreak in London.
In 1854, there was an outbreak of cholera in the London neighborhood of Soho, one of many mid-century epidemics to strike the English capital, then the largest city in the world.
But this episode was different. An English physician named John Snow — born two hundred years ago today — decided to plot the cases on a map of the neighborhood. In doing so, he identified a contaminated well as the source of the illness, founding the study of public health, and changing the design of cities forever.