An extraordinary and underappreciated man, Dr. John Snow

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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 85 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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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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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An extraordinary and underappreciated man, Dr. John Snow

The author scarcely hides his partiality towards cities as centers for human advancement, but in the mid-nineteenth century large cities were prone to outbreaks of disease and could not get a handle on their massive waste management problems. This book focuses on the cholera outbreak in the Soho district of London in 1854, the efforts of two men to pinpoint the causation of cholera, and the subsequent establishment of an adequate sewage system for all of London. Immediately, the reader will feel a large dose of revulsion at the primitive and inadequate manner of dealing with human waste products that London, a tightly packed city of 2.4 million, employed at the time, which of course leads to the author's painful and amazing story.

Occasionally an extraordinary man emerges at a needful time in history. Dr. John Snow, a noted London anesthesiologist, was such a man. He devoted his life to studying interesting medical phenomena including the causation of cholera. He had become convinced during an outbreak in 1848 that cholera could be attributed to the ingestion of impure water, though he was not aware of the biological specifics. Snow immediately tried to find a pattern in the deaths of Sept, 1854, and became convinced that one public-accessed water pump was the source of the cholera. Though virtually all officials were skeptical, Snow did convince one governing body to shutdown the offending pump. An Anglican priest Henry Whitefield was a late-coming ally to Snow's cause.

The author notes that scientific information often emerges rather slowly having to battle both convention and entrenched interests. In this case, it was held that cholera had to be transmitted via the atmosphere and furthermore, putrid smells were the most likely source. Not uncoincidentally according to convention, lower-class neighborhoods smelled the worst making their deaths more likely and justified. Though Snow's painstaking research clearly disallowed atmospheric causation, his keen insights were scarcely acknowledged by so-called noted authorities. However, primarily through the efforts of Whitehead, Snow's ideas gradually gained prominence and within twenty years London had created a sewage system that virtually eliminated the possibility of drinking water being compromised by waste products.

There are some notable disappointments with the book. The one map of the affected area in Soho is completely inadequate. Moreover, one would have expected some basic drawings demonstrating the nature of the waste disposal systems frequently mentioned. Snow the man is not well covered. But even the extraordinary maps that he produced pinpointing the source of the contamination were not included in the book. The author goes slightly astray in his discussions of terrorist threats to modern cities.

The claim of the subtitle that the cholera incident was transformational seems to be an overstatement. What can be said is that awareness of sanitation was gradually raised. Secondly, though his efforts were largely forgotten, Snow was certainly part of a now well-acknowledged tradition of careful data collection and analysis. Personally, Snow's struggles might serve notice to those who dismiss global warming. This time however the ramifications will be higher than a painful, though contained, outbreak of cholera.

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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 Ghost Map Detectives

The Ghost Map started out giving detailed information about London in the 1850's. How the city was growing, thus changing the way people lived and one of those changes was dealing with our "filth". From those that scavenged the streets for anything that might have a purpose to those that collected our dung. These poor night-soil men would have definitely won on the television show "Dirty Jobs". I naturally would have thought that toilets would have been an improvement on cleanliness but not so.

The story then unfolds onto the cholera outbreak in the Soho district in 1854. We follow the neighborhood and its inhabitants on a trail to find out where this outbreak came from and how to stop it. With the powers that be believed it was caused by bad smells "miasma" there was a tough road ahead to convince them otherwise.

Ultimately, there is a friendship established between Dr. John Snow and Rev. Henry Whitehead in their quest for the answers and detailed detective work that produces a map that proves where these deaths began and how Vibrio cholerae ensued.

It was very interesting to see how the littlest detail in a conversation could really make a difference in how the correct information was gathered and how daunting of a task that was at hand but due to Snow and Whiteheads' work, they made a difference in the 1850's and in the modern age as well. This book was well written and my only complaint was that there was a lot of information to take in.

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

A thrilling historical account of the worst cholera outbreak in Victorian London-and a brilliant exploration of how Dr. John Snow's solution revolutionized the way we think about disease, cities, science, and the modern world. From the dynamic thinker routinely compared to Malcolm Gladwell, E. O. Wilson, and James Gleick, The Ghost Map is a riveting page-turner with a real-life historical hero that brilliantly illuminates the intertwined histories of the spread of viruses, rise of cities, and the nature of scientific inquiry. These are topics that have long obsessed Steven Johnson, and The Ghost Map is a true triumph of the kind of multidisciplinary thinking for which he's become famous-a book that, like the work of Jared Diamond, presents both vivid history and a powerful and provocative explanation of what it means for the world we live in. The Ghost Map takes place in the summer of 1854. A devastating cholera outbreak seizes London just as it is emerging as a modern city: more than 2 million people packed into a ten-mile circumference, a hub of travel and commerce, teeming with people from all over the world, continually pushing the limits of infrastructure that's outdated as soon as it's updated. Dr. John Snow-whose ideas about contagion had been dismissed by the scientific community-is spurred to intense action when the people in his neighborhood begin dying. With enthralling suspense, Johnson chronicles Snow's day-by-day efforts, as he risks his own life to prove how the epidemic is being spread. When he creates the map that traces the pattern of outbreak back to its source, Dr. Snow didn't just solve the most pressing medical riddle of his time. He ultimately established a precedent for the way modern city-dwellers, city planners, physicians, and public officials think about the spread of disease and the development of the modern urban environment. The Ghost Map is an endlessly compelling and utterly gripping account of that London summer of 1854, from the microbial level to the macrourban-theory level-including, most important, the human level.

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