Demos
A Blueprint for Data Science Pioneers
At John Snow Labs, our first company value is simple but weighty: serve heroes.
We mean the researchers who stay late refining models that could save lives, the clinicians who struggle through clunky systems just to get data they can trust, and the public health teams tracing outbreaks in real time. They are the people using data to do something that truly matters.
But when we chose our name, we didn’t pick it for the sound. We picked it for the story.
The original John Snow – a physician born in 1813 in the industrial north of England – was one of history’s first data heroes. He mapped deaths before the word “dataset” existed, built life-saving devices with his own hands, and stood by evidence even when it cost him his reputation. Understanding his life isn’t just historical trivia. It’s a mirror, showing us the kind of evidence-backed courage and quiet persistence that our own work in data and AI must live up to. We call these the Five Traits of a Data Hero.
So, let’s walk through his life—not as a museum tour, but as a living example of what it really means to serve heroes.
- Rigor: Staying Close to the Data
John Snow was born in York, the first of nine children in a coal-yard worker’s family. The neighborhood stank of the river and the tanneries; it was the kind of place where health and illness were constant companions. At fourteen, he left home to apprentice with a surgeon-apothecary in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. That winter, cholera tore through the mining towns, killing fast and cruelly. Snow, still a teenager, watched it close up – patients collapsing within hours, families frightened by an invisible force.
Those scenes never left him. They fueled his curiosity about the why.
By 1836, he had saved enough for a single-minded journey: walking from York to London, via Liverpool and Bath, to enroll at the Hunterian School of Medicine. It was a trek of more than 300 miles—an act of faith as much as ambition. He arrived in a city of two million people, many living over open sewers, the air thick with coal smoke, the Thames a slow-moving stew of disease.
Snow’s gift wasn’t classroom brilliance – it was observation. He paid attention to everything: where patients lived, how their water tasted, what their habits were. He walked, he watched, he recorded. The pattern-seeking instinct that would one day map an epidemic was already forming.
Two centuries later, healthcare data science faces a similar truth: progress doesn’t come from distance, but from attention. Just as Snow walked the streets of London to see the problem himself, the heroes we serve champion Rigor. They must stay close to the data – patients, workflows, and the messy human realities behind the numbers – because data rigor begins not with the algorithm, but with observation.
- Transparency: The Open-Source Mindset
By the 1840s, Snow was established in London as a practicing physician. He was fascinated by breathing, gases, and the fine line between life and death in surgery. When news broke from America of a new wonder called “ether,” Snow saw opportunity – and danger. Immediately following the first public demonstration in 1846, a ‘time-to-market’ gold rush erupted. Opportunistic vendors, having no pharmacological understanding, rushed crude inhalers to surgeons. These devices were often little more than sponges soaked in vapor, held over a patient’s face, leading to wildly inconsistent – and sometimes fatal – results.
Snow took a radically different approach. He was appalled by the unscientific nature of these quickly monetized devices, which ignored basic laws of physics and chemistry. He studied the physiology of inhaled gases, establishing dosage control and recognizing that anesthetic strength was dependent on temperature. He didn’t rush a simple product to market; he built apparatus that could regulate concentration with astonishing precision for the time – a brass and glass inhaler that warmed ether in a water bath so the dosage could be scientifically controlled. When chloroform appeared, he refined his design again, testing it meticulously on animals, on himself, and on patients. If John Snow were here today, he would look at the current AI gold rush in healthcare and offer the same weary warning: “Stop selling sponges.”
And then he did something remarkable for a Victorian inventor:
He refused to patent it.
Yes, you read that right – he open-sourced his best work.
In an age when inventors rushed to patent every valve and mask, Snow published his designs, diagrams, and dosing methods in journals and books. Anyone could replicate them. The result was rapid improvement across the profession: safer anesthesia, fewer deaths, and the birth of a discipline built on science instead of bravado.
By refusing the patent, Snow proved he was, in a sense, an open-source engineer. This commitment to Transparency is a core trait of the heroes we serve. Sharing is non-negotiable in safety-critical fields. When healthcare innovators share methods openly – whether algorithms, datasets, or evaluation frameworks – progress accelerates safely. The moment secrecy replaces science, patients pay the price.
- Courage: Challenging the “Miasma”
By August 1854, Snow was 41, living near Soho, when cholera struck again. Within three days, 127 people in a few city blocks were dead. Doctors still believed in “miasma” – bad air, foul smells, vapors rising from waste. Snow wasn’t convinced.
He grabbed his notebook and went door to door, sometimes stepping around stretchers and horse-carts, asking families where they drew their water. He plotted each death on a map, creating clusters of black bars radiating around a single public pump on Broad Street. He noticed the exceptions too: brewery workers nearby, who drank only beer, were largely spared.
How convinced was he? When two thirds of Soho’s population evacuated the cholera-ridden neighborhood, John Snow went right in. More than that, he went door to door to every house and every family that had a death, putting himself at real risk—especially if ‘miasma’ was true.
This action was not merely statistical fieldwork; it was an act of profound Courage. In an age when doctors believed disease traveled through the foul air (miasma), entering the homes of the sick meant willingly inhaling deadly vapors. Snow’s method – personal, painstaking investigation at the epicenter of the outbreak – demonstrated a commitment to evidence over fear and tradition, a hallmark of the heroes we serve today.
His friend, the Reverend Henry Whitehead, joined the detective work, tracking patient histories through baptism records and word of mouth. Together they traced the outbreak to a leaking cesspit beneath a house, just a few feet from the Broad Street well.
Snow also showed Courage in his earlier work on anesthesia, which provoked outrage from the Church of England. The Church declared that easing the pain of childbirth violated Scripture, citing the Book of Genesis that women were meant to “bring forth children in sorrow.” Yet in April 1853, Queen Victoria herself called on Snow to administer chloroform for the birth of her eighth child, Prince Leopold. It worked beautifully. The Queen praised it as “soothing beyond measure.” When she used it again in 1857, the practice was effectively sanctified, settling the moral debate with royal precedent.
Every generation of science faces its own “miasma”—the comfortable idea that resists change. Snow demonstrated Courage. His story reminds us that real progress depends on asking the unpopular questions, backing them with real data, and being willing to stand alone until the proof speaks for itself.
- Persistence: Data Quietly Wins
Snow presented his findings on the Broad Street pump to the parish board. After tense debate, they agreed—cautiously—to remove the pump handle. Within days, cases plummeted.
But there was no standing ovation.
Most of London’s officials and the broader scientific establishment dismissed his theory. The idea that water—not air—carried disease was offensive to 19th-century sensibilities and implied massive municipal negligence. It was easier, more respectable, to blame “the air.”
Undeterred by institutional rejection, Snow paid £200 out of his own pocket to publish his findings himself, as no major medical journal would accept his paper. For comparison, he only recouped £3 & 12s from sales. Few copies sold. When The Lancet, the most prestigious medical journal of the day, reviewed his work, they did so curtly, suggesting his reasoning was “scattered and general.”
At the same time, Snow’s cholera theory unsettled politicians. Accepting his theory meant massive expense and public embarrassment regarding London’s entire infrastructure. So, officials quietly turned the pump handle back on and went back to blaming the air.
Snow didn’t shout. He kept writing, collecting, measuring, refining. When he died four years later, even his obituary largely ignored the cholera work that would make him immortal. The pump map became legend only years later, after new epidemics struck and the sewers were finally rebuilt. The ultimate acknowledgment of his data came in 2013, when The Lancet published a historic correction, 155 years after his death, finally acknowledging Snow’s brilliance.
This is the meaning of Persistence. Progress is rarely about a single moment of discovery. It’s about continuing to collect data and advocate for truth in the face of bureaucracy, ideology, and inertia. For Snow, that meant parish boards and health commissions; for us, it means hospital committees, regulatory frameworks, data silos, and institutional habits that change at a glacial pace.
The lesson endures: Systems resist change, but patient data always wins.
- Humility: The Most Boring Man in London
John Snow was, by all accounts, not much fun at parties. He didn’t drink, didn’t marry, and rarely smiled for portraits. He was a vegetarian in an age of roast beef, a teetotaler in an age of gin, and a solitary man in a city of clubs. His colleagues called him reserved, methodical, sometimes awkward.
He swam in the Serpentine for exercise. He spent his evenings in his small laboratory, tinkering with inhalers and scribbling notes. He co-founded the Epidemiological Society of London—not because it was fashionable, but because he thought data could save lives.
While he was systematic in his note-taking and groundbreaking in his analysis, he was notably uncharismatic in person. His communication style was often described as “reserved, modest, and somewhat cold,” delivered in a slow, deliberate manner. In an age where medical opinion was often swayed by oratory flair and social standing, Snow’s quiet, evidence-heavy presentation –often consisting of dry data tables and charts – was often hard for an audience to swallow.
When he died in 1858 at age 45 from a stroke, London moved on quickly. Only later did his quiet notebooks, maps, and diagrams become monuments. The “boring man” had drawn the blueprint for modern public health.
And maybe that’s the real definition of a hero, the one we look for in the healthcare data trenches: not charisma, but Humility. Not volume, but evidence. The people who reshape healthcare today – the data scientists curating millions of records, the clinicians validating AI tools, the ethicists writing safety standards – rarely make headlines. But like Snow, they will leave a legacy that outlasts the noise.
Epilogue: The Quiet Hero’s Legacy
John Snow’s life is more than a historical curiosity. It’s a pattern.
He walked to where the suffering was. He built tools with his own hands. He shared his methods. He challenged bad science. He stayed humble.
Two centuries later, those are still the essential ingredients of progress in medicine and public health.
If Snow were alive today, he wouldn’t be on social media boasting about his map. He’d be the quiet one in the hospital analytics room, cross-checking the data, asking the uncomfortable question: “Are we sure we’re measuring the right thing?”
Serving heroes means finding and empowering those people – the ones too busy doing real work to chase applause. They are today’s John Snows. Our job is simply to ensure they have the tools, trust, and transparent data necessary to change the world, again.
