GIS Analyses of Dr.

Snow's Map
Snow's map, demonstrating the cholera deaths clustered around the Broad Street
well, provided strong evidence in support of his theory that cholera was a water-
borne disease. Snow drew Thiessen polygons around the wells, defining straight-
line least-distance service areas for each. Each Thiessen polygons is comprised of
boundary segments that perpendicularly bisect line segments drawn between the
point it contains and adjacent points. A large majority of the cholera deaths fell within
the Thiessen polygon surrounding the Broad Street pump, amd a large portion of the
remaining deaths were on the Broad Street side of the polygon surrouding the bad-
tasting Carnaby Street well.

Then Snow redrew the service area polygons to reflect shortest paths along streets
to wells, and an even larger proportion of the cholera deaths fell within the Broad
Street polygon or the Broad Street side of the Carnaby Street well's polygon.

You can try replicating Snow's analyses using GIS allocation and density algorithms.
The pumps and deaths datapoints were digitized by Rusty Dodson at the National
Center for Geographic Information & Analysis (NCGIA) at UC Santa Barbara, using
an arbitrary (not geo-referenced) scan of Snow's map. These data locate 578 cholera
deaths and the 13 public wells in an arbitrary XY coordinate system. I edited these
plain text files so they are directly importable to Arc9: deaths.txt and pumps.txt. I
edited a high-resolution JPEG-format scan of Snow's map, correcting some broken
lines and converting it to a black-and-white TIFF-format image. You can see a GIF-
format version of this map here. The following steps prepare the data for analysis
with Arc9:
After Downloading the TIFF image of Snow's map and the pumps and deaths
datafiles, add them into a blank Arc map session.
Use Tools--Add XY Data to display the pumps and deaths. Zoom the map view to
the pumps.
Activate the Georeferencing toolbar, and fit the map image to the view.
Use the Georeferencing Link tool to link each pump on the map to the corresponding
pump datapoint, then Rectify the image.
This is the rectified image with the pumps (cyan) and deaths (red) overlaid. The
digitizing of the pumps and deaths was not highly accurate, and the original map is
distorted by at least one crease, so I used a 3rd-order rectification, hence the
warping of the map. You might prefer to register the pumps and deaths to the image
coordinates instead.
Arc's Spatial Analyst includes a Distance-Allocation algorithm that defines zones of
cells (known as Thiessen polygons) closest to each pump. The allocation map
shown here is based on straight-line distances to each pump. The Thiessen polygon
for the Broad Street pump contains 356 (61.6%) of the 578 death records.
Here is a kernel density map of the cholera deaths (kernel size = 1.0; cellsize =
0.0025) with density contours overlaid. The density of cholera deaths derived from
this map is 36.8 at the Broad Street pump, versus 2.4 at Carnaby Street, 1.9 at
Rupert Street, 0.8 at Marlborough Mews, 0.2 at Bridle Street, 0.1 at Newman Street
and zero at all other pumps. A simple density analysis with no smoothing yielded a
similar map with discrete edge segments.
Since a straight-line allocation implies travel through walls and buildings rather than
only on streets, I experimented with "cost"-minimizing allocations of deaths to
pumps, where the cost of travel across street cells is low and travel across other
cells is high. This basically replicates Snow's travel-distance analysis.

To distinguish street cells from the interior cells of blocks, you can use a paintbucket
tool (try MS-Paint, Adobe PhotoShop or another image editor) to spill some other
color into the streets. If this color "leaks" into any blocks, you will have to close the
break in the block boundary. edited the image to close lines on a number of city
blocks so the paintbucket color wouldn't leak into them, and I cleared labels from
some streets so they would be "passable." (see edited map) I then used the
paintbucket tool in an image editor to flood all the streets with black. This altered
image was then converted to a binary grid (streets and not streets).
The allocation of deaths to pumps across a simple cost surface ("cost" of each street
cell=1; each other cell=50) assigned 378 (65.4%) of 578 deaths to the Broad Street
pump's cost-weighted allocation polygon, and again, a large proportion of the
remaining deaths were on the Broad Street side of the Carnaby Street well's supply
zone.

A more elaborate cost surface could be constructed based on the widths of streets
(travel on narrow, less-passable streets costs more per cell than on wide, passable
streets), based on straight-line distances from street edges to street centerlines. This
would require substantially more editing of the map image, i.e., removal of all the
remaining street labels, etc.