John Snow was able to monitor his patient in this way. And despite his services to the queen, Dr Snow is not remembered as a great anaesthetist. He is, however, remembered for a completely different reason. In 1854, he described an outbreak of cholera in London, identifying a single public water pump as the source of the infection. He was the first to show how a disease can be contagious, and the founding father of epidemiology, the study of how diseases spread.
