Epidemiological and disease maps

Explore how maps transformed disease, mortality and public health into geography. At the heart of this collection are Dr John Snow’s celebrated maps of the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak and the competing South London water companies—foundational works in epidemiology that helped demonstrate cholera’s transmission through contaminated water. Johnston’s 1856 world map of health and disease, including yellow-fever districts, and Stanford’s 1887 statistical mapping of British mortality and disease place Snow’s work within the wider development of Victorian medical geography. Colonial public-health mapping is represented by maps of plague and cholera across the Bombay Presidency in 1897 and the extraordinary 1911 Indian Plague Investigations: month-by-month and village-level dot maps of human cases, infected rats and experimental guinea-pig deaths in Bombay, which supplied crucial evidence for the rat–flea–human chain of bubonic plague transmission. Dublin Civic Survey maps of 1925 connect deaths and unhealthy areas with population density, hospitals, sewers and urban hygiene. Later maps of Tanganyika and East Africa chart malaria, tsetse distribution and sleeping sickness, revealing the growing use of cartography to analyse relationships between disease, population, sanitation and environment.