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2013 Book Review #56: The Ghost Map
Title: The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How it Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World
Author: Steven Johnson
Genre: History (19th C London)/pop science
Thingummies: 4
Synopsis: How a doctor and a clergyman discovered how cholera is transmitted.
Thoughts: I vaguely knew the story of how removing a pump handle stopped a cholera epidemic, but this book goes into a fascinating level of detail.
Cholera was one of the big terrifying diseases of the 1800s—as the author notes, you just had to live with the knowledge that, no matter how healthy you were, at any point you (and your entire family) could be wiped out in a day and a half and no one knew how to stop or prevent it. Cholera moves shockingly fast by basically causing the body to expell all of its water in a messy, nasty, fantastically painful and scary way to die. We know now that it's a water-bourne disease that can be best treated by rapid rehydration, but for a long time, scientists were convinced that, like malaria, cholera was caused by bad smells.
So it took a lot of courage, both physical and moral, to map a particularly virulant outbreak and then stand up to scientific orthodoxy and declare that the cause of the outbreak was a single pump. It would take awhile for the declaration to finally be accepted. (Meanwhile, New York would go on a massive anti-cholera clean-up that, while it targeted entirely the wrong thing, removed most of the shit from the streets and made the city as a whole enormously more healthy. For once, bad science had good results.)
This is a fascinating book, if you're into this kind of thing. Towards the end, it starts to drift oddly, musing on the modern nature of cities and disasters and such in a way that implies the author had some opinions he wanted to get off his chest and nowhere better to put them. They're interesting, if so tangential to the topic as to be irrelevant. But despite this lack of discipline (perhaps the book felt too short?), it's a good read.
Author: Steven Johnson
Genre: History (19th C London)/pop science
Thingummies: 4
Synopsis: How a doctor and a clergyman discovered how cholera is transmitted.
Thoughts: I vaguely knew the story of how removing a pump handle stopped a cholera epidemic, but this book goes into a fascinating level of detail.
Cholera was one of the big terrifying diseases of the 1800s—as the author notes, you just had to live with the knowledge that, no matter how healthy you were, at any point you (and your entire family) could be wiped out in a day and a half and no one knew how to stop or prevent it. Cholera moves shockingly fast by basically causing the body to expell all of its water in a messy, nasty, fantastically painful and scary way to die. We know now that it's a water-bourne disease that can be best treated by rapid rehydration, but for a long time, scientists were convinced that, like malaria, cholera was caused by bad smells.
So it took a lot of courage, both physical and moral, to map a particularly virulant outbreak and then stand up to scientific orthodoxy and declare that the cause of the outbreak was a single pump. It would take awhile for the declaration to finally be accepted. (Meanwhile, New York would go on a massive anti-cholera clean-up that, while it targeted entirely the wrong thing, removed most of the shit from the streets and made the city as a whole enormously more healthy. For once, bad science had good results.)
This is a fascinating book, if you're into this kind of thing. Towards the end, it starts to drift oddly, musing on the modern nature of cities and disasters and such in a way that implies the author had some opinions he wanted to get off his chest and nowhere better to put them. They're interesting, if so tangential to the topic as to be irrelevant. But despite this lack of discipline (perhaps the book felt too short?), it's a good read.