Divide and Ponder: Dismembering Water to Study Water

Water has been studied by many trades throughout history, from engineering to medicine. In fact, one of the most famous stories in medicine centers around a water pump. Nearly 200 years ago, a cholera outbreak in a London suburb was caused by wastewater contaminating the groundwater that supplied this pump. At this time, physicians were generally ignorant regarding the potential for diseases to spread via water. The education of physicians at that time and place taught that diseases spread from sources of decaying organic matter through air (miasmatic theory). John Snow, a physician with a broad range of expertise, including mathematics and chemistry, investigated this outbreak with a broader perspective than his peers. He identified the contaminated water source as the cause of the outbreak and, thereby, falsified the (now-defunct) miasmatic theory and helped establish a new specialization: epidemiology. Although this story is commonly told from a medical perspective, it could have easily been a story about water. It could be argued that John Snow, like many scientists before the twentieth century, was more of a generalist than a medical specialist. His research on cholera represents a benchmark study in water science: the discovery of how social and hydrological processes can interact to influence contaminant fate and transport (such an aim would certainly be considered ahead of its time by hydrologists, as it fits squarely within the now-fashionable “socio-hydrology” paradigm). One reason this story is not more commonly associated with the field of hydrology may be because water science as a specialization, the formal discipline of hydrology as we understand it today, did not yet exist.