lindbrook 2026-02-27
The standard “textbook” story is that John Snow helped stem the tide of the cholera outbreak by getting local officials to remove the handle of the Broad Street pump (e.g., CDC and NY Times).
While Snow likely believed that this action would have mitigated the outbreak, he was skeptical of its actual effect. In fact, he writes that by the time the pump was removed on Friday, 08 September 1854, “the epidemic had evidently subsided” (Snow 1855b, 153).
As part of the Vestry Report, both he and the committee included
separate tables for the number of deaths and fatalities. I have included
the four sets data in timeSeries(). They can be visualized using the
function’s generic plot method.
plot(timeSeries())
The overall data approximate one another. The same statistics from the different sources are very close.
plot(timeSeries(dataset = "all"), multi.plot = TRUE, points = FALSE)
plot(timeSeries(dataset = c("snow-deaths", "vestry-deaths")), multi.plot = TRUE, points = FALSE)
plot(timeSeries(dataset = c("snow-fatal.attacks", "vestry-fatal.attacks")), multi.plot = TRUE, points = FALSE)