Prior to reading the book, I knew that cholera was a disease that was transmitted through water.  However, I did not know very much about how cholera affected the human body or how deadly of a disease it was.  As such, I was thoroughly eager to start reading the book. The most interesting aspect to me was those that discussed the characteristics of the cholera bacterium and what in particular made the disease so deadly.  The horizontal transfer of genetic material among cholera bacteria allows for recombination at rates that are nonexistent in eukaryotes.  For this reason, it is quite simple for cholera bacteria to transfer from one host to another and to quickly multiply.  Reading about this was absolutely fascinating, yet also enlightening, as I began to grasp the gravity of cholera reproducing so rapidly and subsequently killing the host in a matter of a few days.

Furthermore, I found it rather peculiar that doctors and physicians of the time presented solutions that directly contradicted each others’.  This made me wonder whether there was a uniform school of medicine which taught the same principles of medicine.  If professionals who had the same amount of education were proposing solutions that were in stark contradiction to those of their peers, then there was something explicitly wrong with the practice of uniformity in medical education.  It was the conflicting ideologies of these physicians that made finding the cause of cholera all the more difficult.  Whenever one physician would present his findings, many others would criticize his findings to such an astounding degree as to render the discovery useless.  This is precisely what happened when John Snow presented his findings, indicating that the cause of cholera was water, not air.

Similarly, I found it rather interesting that many physicians did not think of the obvious solution when attempting to cure cholera.  When a disease that causes its victims to lose substantial amounts of water presents itself, it is only logical that the first solution will be replace the lost fluids.  The fact that only one doctor thought of this is rather disturbing, as this points to the ability of physicians to correctly diagnose and treat the disease.  Cholera is indeed a deadly killer that kills with efficiency that is rarely matches by many other diseases, however, it is also one that can be treated rather efficiently.  By providing the patients with clean water to replace the lost fluids and electrolytes, the patient can be cured.