The Day the Universe Changed S01E07 - What the Doctor Ordered: Impacts of New Medical Knowledge

In 1831, in the English port of Sunderland, a man called Bill Sproat collapsed and died. No one knew why. Soon hundreds, then thousands, were dead across the country - and panic spread.

What was the mystery killer? And how could it be stopped? It took a revolution in medicine to provide the answers - and those answers changed us all. But how did Benjamin Franklin get involved? And why did everything depend on Victorian engineering? And what did doctors discover which means that today we should all be entries on a computer?