History
One of the most famous early natural experiments was the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak in London, England.
On 31 August 1854, a major outbreak of cholera struck Soho. Over the next three days 127 people near Broad Street died. By the end of the outbreak 616 people died. The physician John Snow identified the source of the outbreak as the nearest public water pump, which he identified using a map of deaths and illness.
In this example, Snow discovered a strong association between the use of the water and deaths and illnesses due to cholera. Snow found that the water company (the Southwark and Vauxhall Company) that supplied water to districts with high attack rates obtained the water from the Thames downstream from where raw sewage was discharged into the river. By contrast, districts that were supplied water by the Lambeth Company, which obtained water upstream from the points of sewage discharge, had low attack rates. Given the near-haphazard patchwork development of the water supply in mid-Nineteenth Century London, Snow viewed the developments as "an experiment...on the grandest scale." Of course, the exposure to the polluted water was not under the control of any scientist. Therefore, this exposure has been recognized as being a natural experiment.
Read more about this topic: Natural Experiment
Famous quotes containing the word history:
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—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“Anyone who is practically acquainted with scientific work is aware that those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact; and anyone who has studied the history of science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by the “anticipation of Nature.””
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)