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The Ghost Map The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic- and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World
Steven Johnson
Riverhead Books, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59448-269-4 |
Many of us live in large, crowded cities today, and generally don't worry, or even think about what it takes to keep us safe from infectious diseases. The Ghost Map is a book that portrays life in a large, crowded city (19th century London, to be exact) when there were no substantial mechanisms to protect the population from deadly microorganisms. Specifically, the book discusses an important cholera outbreak in the 1850's. However, this account is ultimately an ode to the triumph of careful observation and rational thought, as this particular cholera outbreak permitted the incontrovertible link between the disease and the water supply. This was a paradigm shift as for centuries the widely held belief was that disease was spread through unclean air. Such a realization led to the construction of effective sewer systems that kept polluted waters away from the drinking water supply, and therefore preempted the genesis of future outbreaks.
Wonderfully written and thoroughly researched, the reader is guaranteed a fun and informative story, where the cast of characters comes to life (and whose faces we get to see as there are portraits included). Unfortunately, the microbiological and clinical details of the cholera bacterium and infection are often muddled (betraying that the author is not a trained scientist and so didn't grasp important nuances), but if the reader is willing to overlook this issue, then he/she won't regret spending some time with this book.
