Cartographic Wonders
John Snow's Cholera Map
The map that traced an epidemic to one water pump.
- Map
- Map from On the Mode of Communication of Cholera
- Mapmaker
- John Snow
- Date
- 1854
- Held by
- Internet Archive scan of the book · via Wikimedia Commons
Format
The full-resolution scan, color-managed to the source — yours to print, study, and explore.
Size
$29.00
The story
In the London cholera outbreak of 1854, John Snow marked the cases on this street plan in black, stacking a small rectangle for each one at its address. The stacks crowd around one water pump, at the corner of Broad Street and Cambridge Street, now Lexington Street. Snow used the map in On the Mode of Communication of Cholera to argue that the disease spread through water, against the miasma theory that blamed bad air. Find the pump, then watch the stacks thin as they move away from it. It marks the beginning of epidemiology as a field.
About this reproduction
- A faithful reproduction of a public-domain map held by Internet Archive scan of the book · via Wikimedia Commons — the work is centuries out of copyright.
- Printed to order on 200gsm EMA matte art paper or 400gsm canvas; framed pieces sit behind acrylic.
- Color-managed to the source scan; we correct nothing and invent nothing.
- Ships in 5–10 business days, rolled in a heavy-wall tube (framed and linen-backed pieces ship flat-packed).
- If it arrives less than perfect, we reprint or refund — your choice.
Why our maps cost more than a poster: we print from the highest-resolution scans in existence, at sizes where the engraving itself becomes visible — the sea monsters, the tiny place-names, the burin lines — on matte paper that holds every line without glare.
