International Journal of Epidemiology 2002;31:912-914
© International Epidemiological Association 2002
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Commentary: Dr John Sutherland, Vibrio cholerae and ‘predisposing causes’
Buckingham Chilterns University College, Chalfont St Giles, Bucks HP8 4AD, UK. E-mail: shalli01@bcuc.ac.uk
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In 1884 the German bacteriologist Robert Koch (1843–1910), already celebrated for identifying the organisms that cause anthrax (1876) and tuberculosis (1882), announced that he had identified the Vibrio cholerae in polluted water in India. He thereby confirmed the hypothesis advanced by the English anaesthetist John Snow (1813–1858) 34 years earlier. It would be comforting to record that Koch’s discovery resolved the debate over the causes of epidemic cholera that had occupied scientists and medical practitioners for much of the 19th century. However, such a claim would be false. So resolute were some of the protagonists of the alternative ‘miasmatic’ explanation of disease causation that they were not to be convinced even by a definitive scientific explanation from a future winner of the Nobel prize for medicine. Dr John Sutherland (1808–1891) in the text printed above,1 discusses many of the alternative theories which were deployed to explain the four epidemics* which
Telluric, Electric, Ozonic or Zymotic?
Dr John Sutherland
Predisposing causes
Unwholesome water
Putrid exhalations
Postscript
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