A young mother with a sick baby rinsed her daughter's diapers, then threw the dirty water into a cesspit beneath her home. It was August of 1854, and within a few days a frightful cholera outbreak seized London's Soho district. The disease spread fast through the crowded working-class neighborhood, killing hundreds within a few days.
The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson tells the story of that awful epidemic - the way whole families died together in their apartments, the way local hospitals were flooded with the sick, and the way two very brave men went into the neighborhood to comfort the dying and to try to make sense of what was happening. The result of their work was the realization that cholera did not come from smelly air, or from any inherent moral weakness in its victims. John Snow, the doctor who made the connection, did not know about germ theory or bacteria, but he made a map that linked almost every single victim of cholera to one well. The visual representation of the outbreak on a map made clear, as no amount of argument could have, that the problem was in the water.
The interesting thing about this book is that it's about more than just the cholera outbreak. Johnson uses that to discuss a whole host of other, fascinating topics. Victorian London,
he persuasively shows us, smelled terrible; it was a city with an exploding population, 2.4 million people living within 30 square miles, with no effective sewers, no water treatment, no city-run programs of waste removal.Johnson discusses why the city was growing so rapidly: where all these people came from, and why they lived like this. Why people believed that cholera was caused by the city's undoubtedly horrific smells, and why they refused to believe otherwise. How the sewer system of London was upgraded in the Victorian era, and how this paradoxically made the water less safe to drink. The history of toilets; the delights as well as the dangers of urbanization; the genius of amateur researchers; the rise of health as a public policy issue; all are discussed in this absorbing book.
You'll look at your tap water in a whole new light after reading this one.
