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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

Riverhead Trade

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A well-told tale of science

This book is an eye-opening description of the search for the cause of cholera in Victorian England. It also is a cautionary tale about the resistance of well-meaning scientists and social reformers to believing information or theories that contradict well-established explanations that are little more that dangerous myths. Miasma really is one of those seemingly reasonable and logical ideas that have killed people. I guess you cannot trust your nose to smell out danger all of the time.

As if the author couldn't really decide what he wanted to write about

This book has such a nice narrow focus that I thought it would provide me with a detailed understanding of a topic I wouldn't have ever thought of exploring before: the cholera outbreak in London in 1854. It is a fantastic thesis -- exploring the impact of this one outbreak, and how a few select individuals helped stem the disease during that year, and possibly into the future. Great topic! Give me more! And to be fair, you get a fair amount about this topic in the book. But you have to wade through the author's digressions into really irrelevant topics (no matter how he tries to argue that they are related). Skip the epilogue completely -- it doesn't nothing to help tie things together. And the conclusion contains about one paragraph of content just repeated many many times over a span of about 50 pages. My recommendation? Read the book until the conclusion so that you can leave with a positive experience; the research in the first part of the book is worth a read, but it is just so tainted by the poor conclusion and epilogue that it's difficult to remember what the book offered. (And yes, it is that disjointed and poor of an ending.)

A Chance Purchase of a Book on an Historical Chance

I picked this up when we went to hear Steven Johnson talk about his newest book, but the bookstore had a number of his previous books on display and we looked at these as we waited for his presentation to begin. This one caught my eye because it is about London and because it was the story of an historic use of scientific analysis to study a problem, identify the cause of the problem, and then identify a solution. Having worked in a number of my professional positions as an analyst, this was very appealing.

Steven Johnson is herein presenting the story of a relatively shortlived and relatively minor (to those not caught up in it) outbreak of cholera in London in the summer of 1854. In the process, he also introduces two individuals who contribute to the solving of the mystery of what causes cholera as a result of their efforts studying this particular outbreak in individual efforts that would eventually converge and even overlap. In the process, Steven Johnson unveils a great deal about London in the era of Charles Dickens and the heyday of Queen Victoria. John Snow was already a ground-breaking contributor to the advancement of medicine by reason of his work as an anesthesiologist. His mastery of the use of ether and chloroform was so widely recognized that he was called in to perform this role for the Queen herself on the occasion of the birth of her eighth child in 1853. He remained interested, however, in the wider range of progress in medicine and particularly its unanswered questions.

The recurrent outbreaks of cholera in London and other metropolitan centers of England and Europe had interested Snow for some years before the subject outbreak in London. Steven Johnson's presentation of Snow's investigation of this latest outbreak is a fascinating study of modern research methodology applied to a real world problem. Snow gathers his data, analyzes it in various ways, including by graphically tracing the outbreak on a street map of London, seeking to identify the geographic origins and thus come closer to identifying the starting point of the epidemic. The result is a revelatory breakthrough though one not universally recognized and acclaimed for some years to come..

Ultimately, John Snow's efforts win the support and even partnership of the curate for the area of the cholera outbreak, Henry Whitehead, although he is at first skeptical of Snow's claims. This puts him in company at first with the medical, political, and government establishment who generally agree that cholera is spread through the atmosphere by means of miasma or bad air often accompanied by foul odors. Ultimately, Whitehead's own researchs, reflecting the personal observations made during his many hours touring the area of the outbreak which constitutes a part of his parish leads him to support John Snow's contention that cholera is actually carried and spread by water - especially fouled drinking water. To modern readers this will come as no suprise and the real interest in the tale is the telling of how they came to this conclusion and then how they ulitimately convinced others that John Snow was correct.

Steven Johnson's writing style is pleasant and easy to read. His pacing in the telling of the story is appropriately also relaxed, never hurrying the reader on or leaving the story to drag along. He presents an interesting story in an interesting and readable fashion - it is hard to praise an author more than to say that and I highly recommend this book as a result. And if you happened to actually be interested in the subject matter as well, as was I, than you will doubtlessly be doubly awarded in the reading of it.

First 200 pages are easy to turn

I disagree with the reviewer who wrote:

>>Like all good histories, The Ghost Map branches from the main story to trace the many different ways in which Snow and Whitehead's investigations helped lead to the development of modern cities.<<

Where is it written that historians have to pound you over the head with arguments for their topic being the most important to mankind since the invention of the wheel?

I agree with the reviewer who wrote:

>>Johnson goes on some odd tangents at the end of the book talking about city life and trying to tie internet technology back to the work Snow did. It's a reach and not terribly relevant. I get the feeling it was fun for Johnson to write his pet theories, but they don't really fit here and probably could have been the basis of an interesting book on their own.<<

So skip the ending, but read the first 200 pages. Just don't read them right before dinner.

An argument for overpriced, trés chic bottled water

"Since the dawn of civilization, human culture has demonstrated a remarkable knack for diversity, but eating other humans' waste is as close to a universal taboo as any in the book. And so, without a widespread practice of consuming other people's waste, cholera stayed close to its original home in the brackish waters of the Ganges delta, surviving on a diet of plankton ... But then, after countless years fighting to survive through the few transmission routes available, V. cholerae got a lucky break." - from THE GHOST MAP

If one surveys the books I read (as reflected by my Amazon reviews), one can determine that light reading is pretty much my preference. Trash, actually. So occasionally it's a nice change of pace to report on something a bit more substantive. Not War and Peace or Plato's Republic, but still ...

Cholera was unknown in Britain before 1831. After that, two outbreaks alone, in 1831-33 and 1848-49, exterminated more than 70,000. Then, during ten days in September 1854, Vibrio cholerae emerged in London's Soho district to claim almost 700 lives, a mortality in so short a time and in so confined an area as to be perhaps unparalleled in the country's history up until that time.

THE GHOST MAP by Steven Johnson is the fascinating and instructive narrative account of the densely crowded and unhygienic urban conditions that supported such an outbreak, the course of the Soho epidemic, the subsequent investigation by the story's two "heroes", physician John Snow and clergyman Henry Whithead, into the source and transmission routes of the bacteria, and the dueling theories of disease epidemiology that collided over the incident. The book is part popular history and part popular science.

THE GHOST MAP is at its best during the lead-up to the cholera eruption on or around September 1 and until its abatement roughly two weeks later. The author perhaps comes up slightly short when describing the post mortem of the affair, which included the evolution of Snow's Soho street map - the "ghost map" - depicting the clustering of deaths around the scourge's portal of entry into the intestines of the citizenry; his conclusive Voronoi diagram isn't illustrated in the text at all. Moreover, in a somewhat tiresome Epilogue, Johnson - like a book reviewer - comes across as one liking too much the expression of his own thoughts as he sermonizes regarding the benefits and potential perils of our contemporary world's growing urban population densities.

It didn't hurt my appreciation of THE GHOST MAP that it's set in London, my very favorite city. When I'm next there in April 2010, I'll be sure and visit the water pump replica/Snow memorial at what was then the corner of Broad and Cambridge Streets (now Broadwick and Lexington), and quaff a pint at the John Snow Pub. Cheers, guv!