Commentary: The Researcher as Amateur: John Lea, Cholera, and … the Computer Age

It is the brilliant amateur, not the salaried, tenured professional, who has dominated the long history of epidemiology and public health. Into the early twentieth century, science was an open game in which anyone with an idea could play. Irrespective of academic pedigree or training, researchers presented their findings in magazines, newspapers, and academic journals, seeking the broadest possible audience for their work. In reviewing the history of one such researcher, John Lea, the goal is not simply to review the work of a talented and forgotten researcher who in the 1840s argued local water supplies as a source of pandemic cholera outbreaks. Thinking about John Lea esq., as he signed his papers, of Cincinnati, Ohio, serves as a reminder of the potential importance of today's non-professionals in the study of contemporary disease outbreaks and health problems. They may lack university positions and resources, but low-cost computers, enabling inexpensive yet powerful analytic programs, give modern amateurs the tools to study what, a generation ago, seemed to be the sole prov-enance of the well-funded professional. When pandemic, 'Asiatic cholera' swept across the US Atlantic states in 1832, John Lea assumed, as did most physicians, that it was the same disease as 'cholera morbus', a diarrheic disorder that in retrospect, we today assume was bacterial food poisoning. Having survived an attack of cholera morbus in 1830, Lea dedicated his spare time to discovering the mode of transmission of this 'new' cholera. In the 1840s he proposed a relationship between Asiatic cholera and heavily minera-lized water drawn from local wells and 'passing through strata of marl, producing unwholesome water'.