Medical / Health Related Sleuths of the Origin and Cause of a Cholera Epidemic in London in the 1800s.

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	• The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the ... Steven Johnson Riverhead Trade, 2007 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 92 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Clever story marred by trendy theorizing

It's almost superfluous for me to review Ghost Map, a best-seller with its own webpage and Wikipedia article. So I will be brief. Steven Johnson is clever writer, a young man whose thought provoking story of the London cholera epidemic of 1854 contains a number of profitable ironies and digressions.

The weakness of the book--which no doubt many enthusiasts regard as a strength--is that Johnson is so consumed with communicating Big Ideas that the narrative peters out before the end of the volume, leaving behind a dusting of trendy theories that can make such works successful in the short run and quickly dated thereafter.

For example, Johnson considers one of the lessons of the ghost map story to be the demonstration that there is no moral component to disease. Yet today things "illegal, immoral and fattening" are more-than-ever suspect causes of premature death. Even Johnson's bête noir, the miasmic theory, has made something of a comeback with increased concern about air pollution. Ironically, Johnson's story, which the Chicago Tribune has called "the triumph of reason and evidence over superstition and theory," concludes with an attempt to enshrine its own superstitions and theories.

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The Ghost Map

An interesting read about an old subject, disease before they discovered what caused it. The fellow who did stop an epidemic was laughed at during his lifetime and it was only after his death that the miasma theory was tossed away for more modern theories about disease! Miasma is "bad smells or bad air" which they believed caused things like Cholera. Not of course the bad water they were drinking. But the scientific method was to search out the source, and the source was a well. He got it stopped by turning off the well, over great protests from the neighborhoods he was trying to save.

The Ghost Map was the map he used to display the deaths issuing out FROM that well. Whatever the cause in the well, he proved that it did come from there. The source case threw slop water, wash water, from the first victim, into the drainage field of the well and contaminated it. She killed all of her family and her neighborhood by doing so.

Despite the subject it reads like a mystery novel and I was glued to the pages until the end.

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Inspiring nonfiction

There hardly seems to be a need to add my own praise to all of these glittering reviews, but I'll keep this as brief as I can.

This is a wonderful book, written in an effortless, conversational style that never loses sight of its main points. Though the book is nonfiction, it builds suspense and frames the events it relates as gracefully as any fictional novel. Although the book's central purpose is to tell the story of how a cholera epidemic was quashed in London during the 1800s through the efforts of a medical doctor treating patients in the area, the narrative touches on city planning, bacteriology, literature, philosophy, and the urban dynamic. It's a visionary narrative that will resonate with anyone who lives in a large, diverse urban community, and for those who don't, it's a window onto a complex and exciting urban world.

It's a brilliant book that reads very quickly, and I'd recommend it to fiction readers and nonfiction readers alike.

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The story of cholera

The book is initially a smartly written account of John Snow (a multitalented doctor known for his experiments with ether) & Co. and their battle against the then-invisible cholera bug as well as the contemporary city administrators. Word of the book is "miasma". Great retelling of one of the great stories about the use of rudimentary epidemiology, and the debate surrounding disease transmission in general in 19th century cities. I am not sure what happens after page 200 - the author proceeds to get on the soapbox and starts unsuccessfully trying to connect cholera to nuclear weapons, hence the loss of a star. Still worth a read.

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Medical / Health Related Sleuths of the Origin and Cause of a Cholera Epidemic in London in the 1800s.

This book is an excellent and detailed look into the work of a few men who worked to try to solve the cause of a cholera outbreak in London.

It shows how the principal investigator used logic and reasoning and investigation skills to try to solve the mystery of what was causing the outbreak. It also goes into competing theories and theorists and the ultimate resolution of the cause of it.

The book is on balance an excellent one. I recommend it to anyone interested in medical and public health investigations, or in science, reasoning, and problem solving.

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reviews: 1, page 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

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