Cracking Cholera’s Code: Victorian Insights for Today’s Technologist
summary
Argues that John Snow’s concrete claim — cholera spreads by ingesting contaminated water not by miasma — rests on a mapped cluster of deaths, the surprising counts (over 100,000 people died in earlier outbreaks, five of 535 in Poland Street, zero at the nearby Lime Brewery), and simple interventions: map cases, use a current reality tree cause‑and‑effect diagram, stop sourcing from contaminated Thames points and boil your water. Applies the same method to modern IT: diagnose beliefs before coding or automation or the wrong process just gets locked in.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00Victorian lessons for tech
- 1:06Why cholera’s Victorian history matters today
- 10:18Faulty beliefs harm systems
- 19:32Jon Snow’s cholera insights
- 28:13Technology needs right beliefs
- 37:53Managers confront assumptions
- 44:41Q&A
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