Epidemiological and disease maps

Explore disease, mortality and public health through maps that transformed statistics into geography. The collection includes pioneering work by Dr John Snow, whose mapping of deaths during the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak revealed their concentration around a contaminated Soho water pump. His map of the Southwark and Vauxhall and Lambeth water companies provided evidence that cholera was transmitted through polluted water rather than “bad air”. Maps of the Bombay Presidency chart the distribution and mortality of plague and cholera during 1897, recording epidemics in British India. American maps from 1900 compare death rates across the United States from tuberculosis, influenza, typhoid fever, diphtheria and croup, as well as cancer and other tumours. Together, these antique and vintage maps show how physicians, statisticians and public authorities learned to identify patterns, test theories and understand relationships between disease, population, environment, water supply and sanitation—helping establish the foundations of modern epidemiology.