OK, I have finally gotten around to writing about “The Ghost Map.” :) This is another in my series of books about death and disaster, which I so enjoy reading. In this installment, the agent of destruction is the bacterium that causes cholera, and the setting is 1850s London.
I don’t think I would really have liked living during this time period. For starters, the city was overrun with sewage. It was also a place where illness and death constantly lurked, in the air you breathed, in the water you drank. And the worst of it was, people had no idea what was causing cholera or any of the other diseases that periodically broke out in the overcrowded city.
As author Steven Johnson writes:
“To live in such a world was to live with the shadow of death hovering over your shoulder at every moment. To live was to be not dead yet… As a matter of practical reality, the threat of sudden devastation—your entire extended family wiped out in a matter of days—was far more immediate than the terror threats of today.”
One London physician, John Snow, suspected that cholera was transmitted through drinking water, but his theory was sneered at by most of the medical establishment, who believed the disease was “miasmatic,” or carried in the (very stinky) air that arose from London’s overflowing sewers and cesspools.
During one outbreak in August 1854, Snow determined that the vast majority of those who fell ill had drunk water from a particular neighborhood well. Even when he presented this map to city health officials, they clung to the miasma theory, but eventually Snow was able to persuade them he was right. That realization led Londoners to built one of the most extensive sewer systems in the world and essentially eliminate cholera in the city.
In fact, the development of modern sewer systems, according to Johnson, was one of the key factors that allowed cities to develop into places that can sustain huge numbers of people.
This book is loaded with historical detail and Johnson does a good job of placing the 1854 outbreak into a broader historical context. It’s also a definite page-turner. I highly recommend it, especially if you share my taste for books about disease and disaster…
2 comments:
And I do! (creepily enough) How does it compare to Gina Kolata's "Flu," which I loved?
I would say the books are pretty similar. The cholera epidemic killed killed a lot fewer people, so it's less spectacularly dreadful, but the context surrounding this one makes the book just as interesting as "Flu." You should read it! :)
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