Why 1854?
Asta, here.
I'm a history nerd. Always have been. I'm also a patient, a carer, and someone who has watched people I love wait far too long for answers that healthcare should already have. That combination is probably why I ended up here, writing about healthcare innovation and with a level of impatience that surprises even me sometimes.
I named this newsletter 1854 because of two stories from that year that I keep coming back to.
The first story is about Dr. John Snow. Cholera was tearing through London's Soho: more than 600 people died in ten days. Snow didn't wait for consensus. He mapped the deaths, traced them to a single water pump on Broad Street, and got the handle removed. The outbreak stopped. He observed, he mapped, he acted. People lived who would have died.
The second story is about Charles Babbage. He spent decades trying to build a Difference Engine, lost his government funding, and never finished it. In 1854, a Swedish printer named Georg Scheutz built one anyway, working from Babbage's designs. The idea outlasted the setback. That, for me, is the note of optimism I want to carry into this work. Even when it feels like a lost cause, even when the funding runs out and the momentum dies, things still get built. People find a way.
In healthcare, that matters more than almost anywhere else. Understanding how innovation gets funded, built, and delivered today, and what better looks like tomorrow, is the whole point. That's what 1854 is here to decode.
