Research on cholera has contributed both to knowledge of the epidemic in particular, and to a broader understanding of the fundamental ways in which cells communicate with each other. This volume presents current knowledge in historical perspective to enable the practitioner to treat cholera in a more effective manner, and to provide a comprehensive review for the researcher.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1874. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.

The product of six years of collaborative research, this fine biography offers new interpretations of a pioneering figure in anesthesiology, epidemiology, medical cartography, and public health. It modifies the conventional rags to riches portrait of John Snow by synthesizing freshinformation about his early life from archival research and recent studies. It explores the intellectual roots of his commitments to vegetarianism, temperance, and pure drinking water, first developed when he was a medical apprentice and assistant in the north of England. The authors argue thatall of Snow's later contributions are traceable to the medical paradigm he imbibed as a medical student in London and put into practice early in his career as a clinician: that medicine as a science required the incorporation of recent developments in its collateral sciences--chiefly anatomy,chemistry, and physiology--in order to understand the causes of disease. Snow's theoretical breakthroughs in anesthesia were extensions of his experimental research in respiratory physiology and the properties of inhaled gases. Shortly thereafter, his understanding of gas laws led him to rejectmiasmatic explanations for the spread of cholera, and to develop an alternative theory in consonance with what was then known about chemistry and the physiology of digestion. Using all of Snow's writings, the authors follow him when working in his home laboratory, visiting patients throughoutLondon, attending medical society meetings, and conducting studies during the cholera epidemics of 1849 and 1854. The result is a book that demythologizes some overly heroic views of Snow by providing a fairer measure of his actual contributions. It will have an impact not only on theunderstanding of the man but also on the history of epidemiology and medical science.

Cholera—the dehydration disease that can be fatal in just one or two days—has been one of mankind's most tenacious and enigmatic adversaries. Its well-documented history is the story of the vagaries of a disease that originated in the Ganges delta, where it causes annual epidemics, whose European incarnation is as old as the Battle of Waterloo, and which was responsible for six pandemics in the nineteenth century alone, three reaching the United States, claiming 300,000 lives altogether. This book records the role of U.S. medical science in the most recent—and finally successful—campaign against cholera. Drs. van Heyningen and Seal describe the first large-scale American research encounters with cholera, in Cairo in 1947 and in Bangkok in 1959. The authors then trace the growth in U.S. scientific and political interest in the eradication of cholera and describe the medical research and training facilities founded by the United States in Asia. There were failures as well as successes—exhaustive field trials of cholera vaccine proved ineffective—but eventually a simple oral treatment was found, and, in the process, advances were made toward the treatment of other dehydration diseases. The authors devote an entire chapter to the biochemistry underlying the physiology of cholera because its implications reach far beyond the disease itself and throw light on many aspects of normal and abnormal biochemistry. They also recall the debt of modern cholera research to earlier discoveries, which were too often neglected. This extraordinary history of one of the most important developments in medicine concludes with an account of how, with the emergence of the independent republic of Bangladesh, the U.S.-dominated cholera research laboratory was, with good will, transformed into a locally controlled international center for the study of diarrhoeal disease and related problems.