Cholera: Geospatial Data and Voronoi Analysis of the 1854 Outbreak

Supplying digitized geospatial coordinates and analytical tools for John Snow's landmark 1854 London cholera map, maintained by lindbrook. It contains spatial records of cholera fatalities and water pump locations from the Broad Street outbreak, updated as recently as March 2026. The data is designed to support epidemiological research through computational geometry techniques.

Use Cases

• Spatial analysis of cholera deaths relative to pump locations using Voronoi polygons
• Visualizing the 1854 Broad Street outbreak through Delaunay triangulation
• Teaching epidemiological principles using digitized historical coordinates

Strengths

• Digitized version of the foundational 1854 epidemiological map
• Includes pre-computed Voronoi polygon boundaries for pump neighborhoods
• Supports Delaunay triangulation for advanced spatial proximity analysis

Limitations

• Restricted to a single historical event in 19th-century London
• Small sample size limited to the Soho neighborhood outbreak
• Lacks modern clinical variables or demographic metadata

Provenance

Source

John Snow's 1854 Broad Street cholera map

Collection Method

Digitization of historical map records

Time Range

1854

Freshness

Historical data from 1854; the R package implementation was last updated in March 2026.

Geography

Soho, London, UK