SNOW, John (1813-1858)

Лот 202
10.12.2025 12:00UTC +00:00
Classic
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Место проведенияВеликобритания, London
Комиссияsee on Website%
ID 1514486
Лот 202 | SNOW, John (1813-1858)
Оценочная стоимость
£ 15 000 – 20 000
SNOW, John (1813-1858)
On the Mode of Communication of Cholera... Second edition. London: [T. Richards for] John Churchill, 1855.
Presentation copy of the greatly expanded second edition: this edition is the first to feature the Broad Street pump, which represents the first use of a spot map in epidemiology. We are able to trace just one other presentation copy at auction since 1955.

The text incorporates the substance of all of Snow's articles published since the first edition of 1849, ‘together with much new matter’ (Preface, p. iii), making this essentially a new work. In this edition Snow provides detailed historical and statistical evidence for his conviction that cholera is a contagious disease that attacks the alimentary canal and is communicated primarily through contaminated water. ‘In the great London epidemic of 1854, Snow's genius as an epidemiologist and statistician reached fruition. By meticulous survey he established [in the present work] that the areas supplied by water from the Southwark and Vauxhall Water Company, obtained from the fecal-contaminated Thames, were infected nine times more fatally than the areas supplied by the Lambeth Company, which supplied water from an upstream source. Even more dramatic was the affair of the Broad Street pump [first described here], which he showed by careful plotting to be in the centre of a cholera outbreak in his own parish of Soho. Within a few hundred yards of this pump, some five hundred fatal cases occurred in ten days. Snow found that a sewer pipe passed within a few feet of the well, and his belief that contaminated water was the source of infection was vindicated when he persuaded the parish councillors to remove the pump handle’ (DSB), resulting in a dramatic drop in the number of cholera cases.

Thirty years before Koch's discovery of the cholera vibrio, Snow reasoned that the disease was propagated by a living organism, and recommended hygienic precautions such as boiling water of suspicious origin, washing the hands frequently, and decontaminating soiled linen. Norman 1969; Waller 9036.

Octavo (223 x 140 mm). 2 large folding lithographed maps by C. F. Cheffins, the second printed in 3 colors, letterpress tables, 16-leaf publisher's catalogue (of medical books) at end dated November 1854 (first 4 leaves silked, small chips to D7-8 restored in blank upper corners, maps silked repairing a few tears, some loss to upper right corner of first map and staining from previous tape repairs, a few margins with neat repairs to closed tears). 20th-century plum cloth, lettered in gilt on spine. Provenance: authorial presentation inscription on title (‘Presented by the Author’) – Royal Society of Medicine (ink stamps).
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