What are the origins of epidemiology?
Well, the history of epidemiology is fairly venerable. For example, consider the writings of Hippocrates, and Hippocrates is interesting because he is one of the, among the first to try to show an association between an environmental factor and disease. For example, he pointed out that when people lived in certain areas near contaminated water or near low-lying areas, they're more likely to come down with health problems. The term "malaria" kind of harkens of the idea of "mal area", bad air. Later on in the history of epidemiology, there was important work done to look at vital statistics records. The investigator or the important historical figure John Graunt is called the Columbus of biostatistics and his important contributions were that he observed features of mortality that we observe today and also of births, for example, that more births are among males than among females. Later on then we have the work of John Snow who conducted his famous natural experiment on the association between water quality in London and Soho and the development of cholera. And then moving on from that, perhaps one of the more recent historical breakthroughs was the work of Koch and Koch's postulates, whose work led to the identification of the micro bacterium tuberculosis and to the demonstration that a specific microbiologic agent was associated with the aetiology of tuberculosis. And then more recently, in the more recent history of epidemiology, we have of course the work that was done on showing an association between smoking and lung cancer. And then in addition, the famous Framingham study that developed some of the basic information that we have about coronary risk factors and coronary heart disease.
