The Greatest Benefit to Mankind

Write an essay citing from The Greatest Benefit to Mankind by Roy Porter /John Snow’s On the Mode of
Communication of Cholera

1) Réné Laennec’s 1819 On Mediate Auscultation details his invention of the stethoscope, and his techniques for using
it. Why do you think this text stand as an emblem of the changes that took place in medical practice after the French
Revolution?

USE On Mediate Auscultation AS A SOURCE AS WELL

2) Steven Johnson, author of a book about John Snow, has called London in 1854: an industrial era city, with an
Elizabethan era waste-removal system as perceived by a Pleistocene era brain.’ (The Ghost Map, p. 130.) What had the
public health officials of the time concluded about cholera and how did John Snow’s On the Mode of Communication of
Cholera change their perceptions of the problem?
3) Louis Pasteur attended the Seventh International Medical Congress in London in 1881, where he gave a brief account
of his experiments with vaccination. What was the significance of the events he described?