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    The Ghost Map
    The Ghost Map
    The Ghost Map
    Audiobook8 hours

    The Ghost Map

    Written by Steven Johnson

    Narrated by Alan Sklar

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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and commerce, teeming with people from all over the world, continually pushing the limits of infrastructure that's outdated as soon as it's updated.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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateDec 1, 2006
    ISBN9781400172986
    The Ghost Map
    Author

    Steven Johnson

    Steven Johnson is the internationally bestselling author of several books, including How We Got to Now, Where Good Ideas Come From, The Invention of Air, The Ghost Map and Everything Bad is Good for You. The founder of a variety of influential websites, he is the host and co-creator of the PBS and BBC series How We Got to Now. Johnson lives in Marin County, California, and Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and three sons.

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    Reviews for The Ghost Map

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      Johnson does a great job of weaving the 1854 Cholera crisis into a larger tale about the positive and potentially dreadful issues that exist in our rapidly urbanized “city-planet” a century and a half after the fact. Most of the book is indeed dedicated to the London epidemic and is mainly structured from the perspective of John Snow’s emergence as a dedicated, fastidious medical professional that must develop his water-born disease theory in the face of long-held embrace of the miasma theory (fetid air as the communication device of the disease) among other more absurd theories. Ultimately the story has two heroes, Snow and the Reverend Henry Whitehead who originally denounced Snow’s idea and ridiculed the removal of the pump handle. But all of this is likely found within the book description above, so there’s no need for me to subject this to my dubious contortions.I’ll simply say that this is not a linear narrative as Johnson is all over the place chronologically and thematically, despite the day-to-day account/chapter heads that only somewhat structures the story. It works well, in my opinion, and warrants my bestowment of the title “page-turner” to his effort. He necessarily delves into the more scientific aspects – rendering the information in a clear way for us laypeeps. Of course he’s also a layperson so I’d be curious to read the opinion of a real scientist or medical professional. Occasionally I did have this odd sensation that he was writing and repeating /reiterating statements in such a simplistic, almost preachy prose as if directed towards a slow eleven year old. And this wasn’t even so much with the scientific explanations but with statements dealing with Victorian era morality. I also – having read one of his previous books, and seeing his lecture – found myself thinking “aha!” as I was about mid-way through the concluding chapter. Here he suddenly confronts us with a dissertation about how communication devices and potentialities of the 21st century enables new and uncharted forms of urban interrelations – essentially his main agenda as evidenced by his other writings. I was initially bothered as I really just wanted the London story, but it all comes together – mostly in the Epilogue – as a resolved and interesting series of correlations and statements about scientific inquiry, issues relating to dense urban settlement and how the idea of an informational/projective “map” has transformed (the proof of which I see immediately to the right where, as I type, some digital add for something called the ATT "LOOPT" maps a conversation between two women in New York who realize they had purchased the same "cute dress" from that same "cute boutique." Tragedy is averted as the instantaneous LOOPT conversation allows one to return her dress immediately, thus avoiding an attire faux pas later that evening. Thank goodness...).
    • 3/5
      It's the history of London in the summer of 1854, specifically the people living around the Broad Street pump in Soho, and one of the worst Cholera outbreaks in English history.It was interesting on several levels, not the least of which being that it was well written. I hadn't known much, if anything, about Cholera so I got to learn about an unfamiliar disease (it's a particularly bad case of diarrhea (as in you can lose 30% of your weight in water in less than 24 hours which basically causes massive organ failure), still being passed around slums in developing cities, which is particularly sad given that it's really easy to cure - just get lots (and lots and lots and lots) of fluids). It's also a great period piece, capturing a London neighborhood at a particular point in time and really delving into what it would have been like to live there (more people per square mile than NY today with all of it's sky-rises, your neighbors dropping dead, human excrement over-flowing everywhere). We present the Dickens Christmas Fair as an idyllic Christmas postcard, but that wasn't Dickens' world nor was it the world he was portraying in his novels: read Bleak House if you don't believe me.The last third of the book is an assessment of the threats that still face our society, including nuclear suit-case bombs and why we're afraid of Avian Flu. That part was interesting but incomplete. Anytime you say, "I could explain more but I recently published an article about it for Wired magazine that you can read if you're interested" you've dropped the ball. Either get permission to reproduce it in part or in whole or use your notes to write it differently for the new publication.All in all, it's worth reading, especially if you have an interest in Victorian London, epidemiology, or the terrors or modern life.
    • 4/5
      This book is a compelling piece of narrative history, telling the story of a nineteenth-century cholera outbreak in London and the vivid characters that worked to save a working class London community and to advance the science of their day. The dogged doctor and the social cleric make for a fascinating duo to explore the community and to learn how disease found a welcome breeding ground in a rapidly developing city. The author discusses how scientific progress was finally (and slowly) made and makes a number of suggestions about how to consider modern city life, the rapid expansion of cities in developing countries, and the threats the contemporary city faces. All of which provides a rich banquet of food for thought.
    • 5/5
      It is easy to forget that cholera is not a strictly historical issue when reading this book. It did make me very glad that I live in both a time and a place where I can have indoor plumbing, even if I do live in a house with only one bathroom.The author was great at explaining the social roadblocks to a clean water supply in Victorian times - but I get the feeling that not much has changed in many cities even now, something that is touched on briefly in the epilogue.
    • 4/5
      A history of sanitation. Informative and riveting.
    • 3/5
      This book describes the cholera epidemic in Victorian London and the research done by Dr John Snow to discover the source. Snow's methodology created a map identifying the spread of the disease combined with the source of drinking water thus disproving the widely-held miasma theory. Johnson's account was very interesting in the early part of the book and then became mired in detail with much repetition, eventually veering into an unnecessary look at modern times.To illustrate the horror of the 54,000 epidemic-caused deaths in one year, Johnson bizarrely asks the reader to imagine such an event happening in Manhattan!
    • 3/5
      A quick and interesting read. It fit in well with "The Big Necessity" which I also read this year.
    • 4/5
      Very interesting but not an 'engrossing' story
    • 3/5
      This is mostly a fascinating look at the London cholera outbreak of 1854 and the efforts of 2 men to discover the true cause of the epidemic. At that time, and for many years afterwards, most people believed that disease was caused by miasma - bad smells. Years before any knowledge of germs, there were still a few who questioned the miasma theory. Nor did they believe that susceptibility to disease was a result of social or economic class or fortitude, as were also common. Johnson walks us through the steps taken to identify and prove that cholera was caused by contaminated water. And follows that up with the progress taken by London, and other cities, to improve sanitation in the last half of the 19th century to the point where cholera is virtually unheard of in modern urban areas. Near the end of the book, however, he veers off onto a tangent about the development of urban communities in current times and the ways that "mapping" is being developed and used in unconventional ways. If this is interesting to you, then keep reading by all means. If you are waiting for him to come back around to 19th century London and wrap everything up, then feel free to stop reading at any time. He never does. These last two chapters (labelled as "conclusion" and "epilogue") very nearly spoiled the entire book for me. I had to think about it for a day, but I realized that I still enjoyed the first 7 chapters more than I hated the last 2.
    • 5/5
      Far more than the tale of a classic map that changed and played a major part in founding the science of epidemiology, it is a chronicle of two investigators' tenacity and intellectual rigor. Fascinating, rich in multiple human and scientific and cultural layers and debates.
    • 4/5
      The book is ostensibly about a cholera outbreak in the 1850's in London but in telling the story it tells the story of London,various persons, public health, epidemiology, bacteria etc. The ending kind of wanders off in speculation but otherwise excellent.
    • 4/5
      I wanted this book to be a history book and it started out that way. The Ghost Map tells the tale of the Cholera Epidemic of 1854 and is a fascinating story of science and sleuth. But then author Steven Johnson kept going down these paths--paths of excruciating detail about Victorian London and how crowded it was and how much it stunk and how filthy it was. I wondered all the synonyms that Johnson used for excrement. (A lot!) It all seemed too much. I kept wanting it to get back to the story's mystery and how it was solved.And then, when I reached the end, I realized that that WAS the story--the birth of the modern city and all the perils that it entailed and how we are still learning how to live in large, metropolitan areas together as we continue to move from rural areas. I guess next time I need to pay more attention to the sub-title.The last chapter was really an informative one as Johnson explains the factors that affect modern urbanization and whether, in his opinion, we can survive them. I listened to this book on Audible, and now I wish I had that last chapter in print, so I could take notes. He's got some really good stuff in there. And I'd like to go back and review some of those very detailed sections that I thought were dragging the story and turned out to be the data points to Johnson's main thesis.All in all an interesting book--I learned something both about cholera and about cities. Recommended.
    • 3/5
      Interesting story but it repeats it's self, drags and goes off topic too many times for my liking. It would have been a stronger book if was shorten
    • 4/5
      This must be the best book I've read this year! Why? Let's start with his style. Right from the start Steven Johnson grabs the story, shakes it in front of you, and then runs with it. Every now and then he "runs round the block", adding context and surroundings, then back to the chase. Brilliant! Then his characters. Not many of them, but they are all well painted. He describes their strengths and weaknesses, and the way these contribute to the story, with the skill of a novelist. Next, the narrative. Several strands, all coming together like a well-constructed detective story. But this all happened, not far from where my own ancestors lived, though far away from where another of my ancestors died in an earlier cholera outbreak. It's a detective story but with that special twist - it was all too real for those in the story. Finally, his Conclusion draws a slew of lessons learned and his Epilogue shows their relevance to life post-9/11. Just add a good full-spread map at the front, and Notes, Bibliography, and a decent index at the back, and you have it made.(
    • 3/5
      I was disappointed by this. Partly because I don't think it lived up to its hype, but mostly because I think Johnson had about 75 pages of material, and he really had to work hard to stretch it into a full book.The book is about a horrible cholera outbreak in Victorian London, and a doctor who investigated the source of the outbreak and discovered that it was a contaminated well. The conventional wisdom at the time was that diseases spread in the air, so this particular outbreak and the fact that it was proven to come from contaminated water marked a major turning point in our understanding of disease and the need for clean water.The story is fascinating, and the information is well-researched. However, the book is really bad at setting up reader expectations and then not meeting them. For instance, the titular Ghost Map isn't even mentioned until the very final chapter, and then it turns out the map was an after-the-fact thing that played a very small role in the actual events. Johnson also does a lot to build up the door-to-door investigations done at the time, but then says very little about the actual process of investigation. Kudos to him for not making up information he doesn't have, but it was disappointing that he didn't have that information after playing it up to be so important.That's not to say I regret reading the book (although I did skim some of the very long tangents about urbanization and environmentalism) - there was lots of really interesting information here. I just wish it had been more focused.
    • 3/5
      This book delves—in a pop-scientific way—into the 1850s cholera outbreak in London, England. This was at a time when cholera wasn't in the medical books and thoughts about miasma were flounced about by so-called medical professionals.

      Johnson is very good at providing ample background information to whatever happens during this book, for example, the following two paragraphs:

      Water closets were a tremendous breakthrough as far as quality of life was concerned, but they had a disastrous effect on the city’s sewage problem. Without a functioning sewer system to connect to, most WCs simply flushed their contents into existing cesspools, greatly increasing their tendency to overflow. According to one estimate, the average London household used 160 gallons of water a day in 1850. By 1856, thanks to the runaway success of the water closet, they were using 244 gallons.

      But the single most important factor driving London’s waste-removal crisis was a matter of simple demography: the number of people generating waste had almost tripled in the space of fifty years. In the 1851 census, London had a population of 2.4 million people, making it the most populous city on the planet, up from around a million at the turn of the century. Even with a modern civic infrastructure, that kind of explosive growth is difficult to manage. But without infrastructure, two million people suddenly forced to share ninety square miles of space wasn’t just a disaster waiting to happen—it was a kind of permanent, rolling disaster, a vast organism destroying itself by laying waste to its habitat. Five hundred years after the fact, London was slowly re-creating the horrific demise of Richard the Raker: it was drowning in its own filth.

      London's population exploded in size and nearly in crises; finding housing for everyone is one thing, but to try and keep sickness away proved impossible, especially when one considers that words from people who belonged to clerical professions carried the most heft where it came to matters medical (and scientific).

      Descriptions of how cases of cholera broke out are detailed:

      All that history would have weighed like a nightmare on Mr. G, as his condition worsened on Thursday. He may have begun vomiting during the night and most likely experienced muscle spasms and sharp abdominal pains. At a certain point, he would have been overtaken by a crushing thirst.

      But the experience was largely dominated by one hideous process: vast quantities of water being evacuated from his bowels, strangely absent of smell and color, harboring only tiny white particles. Clinicians of the day dubbed this “rice-water stool.” Once you began emitting rice-water stools, odds were you’d be dead in a matter of hours. Mr. G would have been terribly aware of his fate, even as he battled the physical agony of the disease. One of cholera’s distinctive curses is that its sufferers remain mentally alert until the very last stages of the disease, fully conscious both of the pain that the disease has brought them and the sudden, shocking contraction of their life expectancy.

      The Times had described this horrifying condition several years before in a long feature on the disease: “While the mechanism of life is suddenly arrested, the body emptied by a few rapid gushes of its serum, and reduced to a damp, dead…mass, the mind within remains untouched and clear,—shining strangely through the glazed eyes, with light unquenched and vivid,—a spirit, looking out in terror from a corpse.”

      By Friday, Mr. G’s pulse would have been barely detectable, and a rough mask of blue, leathery skin would have covered his face. His condition would have matched this description of William Sproat from 1831: “countenance quite shrunk, eyes sunk, lips dark blue, as well as the skin of the lower extremities; the nails…livid.” Most of this is, to a certain extent, conjecture.

      But one thing we know for certain: at one p.m. on Friday, as baby Lewis suffered quietly in the room next door, Mr. G’s heart stopped beating, barely twenty-four hours after showing the first symptoms of cholera. Within a few hours, another dozen Soho residents were dead.

      This book almost turns into a complete hagiography where John Snow is concerned. He is the main character in this non-fiction book, which is nearly written in the way that a modern-day crime novel is: Snow's from a poor background, studied hard, worked his way up, and could have lived a relatively cozy existence as the man who started out modern-day anesthesiology. John Snow didn't do that.

      Instead, he started looking into what was killing thousands of people and what the source of it could be, much like any modern-day forensic investigation could ramble along.

      The idea of microscopic germs spreading disease would have been about as plausible as the existence of fairies to most practicing doctors of the day. And as Surgeon-in-Chief G. B. Childs’ letter-writing campaign to the Times suggested, laudanum was regularly prescribed for almost any ailment. The Victorian medical refrain was, essentially: Take a few hits of opium and call me in the morning.

      This book is an easy read. I'm not one for pop-scientific books with oodles of fact, being nerdy in the extreme, but in spite of its monograph value, this book won me over, mainly through Johnson's style and well-written prose.

      This is an analyst's book. It's divided into clear chapters and goes finely into details. There's not much flair over Johnson's writing, in a good way, which is apt, considering his near-dry British way of going over things; he walks the line between terse humour and in-depth medical detail in commendable ways.
    • 4/5
      Very good read. Nicely researched.
    • 5/5
      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 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.
    • 5/5
      Taut and engrossing, Steven Johnson's 'The Ghost Map' is a rollicking multidisciplinary romp through Victorian London's scientific, cultural and medical evolution. Johnson's focal point is a devastating--indeed, decimating--1854 cholera outbreak in Soho, which becomes a crucible of the nascent field of epidemiology and highlights the stark changes in science throughout the mid-19th century. Johnson paints a picture of early Victorian London as a place of quack doctors, scientific misunderstanding and cultural prejudice. Indeed, outbreaks of cholera and other infectious diseases were seen as wafting in on waves of the city's stench--miasmas--and affecting mostly those of 'lesser quality', the vast masses of urban poor living in crowded squalor cheek-by-jowl with open sewers. By contrast, our hero, sleuth-doctor-researcher John Snow, is turning the medical community on its ear by suggesting that cholera might be, somehow, 'in the water.' His detective work is aided by a surprising sidekick, local clergyman Henry Whitehead. It is, as you might imagine, an uphill battle to topple what is presumed as medical fact: things that smell bad make you sick. Johnson's attention rarely seems to wander, and the momentum of the story is nearly unrelenting. He takes crisp, intriguing side trips into related subjects, but consistently keeps his eye on the ball. As a result, the book is an absolute page-turner. He even manages to describe the deplorable sanitary conditions of 19th century London without sounding like he's trying for shock value--a real skill.Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      This is the story of the terrifying cholera epidemic in 1854 that attacked the Soho District in London. In the epidemic, nearly 700 people living within 250 yards of a contaminated well perished. Johnson is an accomplished storyteller (see his book Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software for another lively read) and his descriptions of the fetid living conditions found in Victorian London are not for the squeamish. But this story is about so much more than just re-telling the story of how John Snow pieced together the evidence that cholera was spread by contaminated water and convinced the local board to remove the handle of the Broad Street water pump. In truth, it wasn't that simple, and the Health Board resisted the evidence then and for years to come in favor of their firmly established--and wrong--miasmic theory of contamination. So, it is first and foremost a story of how science works in the real world and how truly difficult it is to convince the establishment to accept evidence that differs from their pre-conceived notions of how things must be.
    • 4/5
      Facinating history of how cholera spread throughout the Soho area of London in the 1850's. A heavy and not thrilling topic made readable by Johnson's "detective story" like tale.
    • 3/5
      I really like Steven Johnson's thinking and moreover, his writing. Emergence was a great book, and The Ghost Map ties into that book by looking at the city of London (in 1854), the epidemic, and the cholera bacteria as systems. The book's account of the day-to-day actions of Dr. John Snow as he maps the epidemic are a bit tiresome at times, but it's amazing to me that 150 years later an author can recount those actions to show how Snow ended up becoming the father of epidemiology!
    • 5/5
      The story was great. You might be thinking, "I don't know about reading this. I've heard tons of 10 and 30 minute versions of this story. Is an 8 hour version worth it?" It is.The last 20% of the book is the conclusion and it gets a bit off-topic. I don't think you'll really miss out on anything if you choose to skip it. There are good points made and discussed but if you're just here for the Ghost Map story then don't worry about it.
    • 4/5
      I'd heard this book widely praised from a number of quarters and it deserves its reputation. My one complaint is that its conclusion and epilogue seemed to be trying to hard to reach some sort of global conclusion about city life and epidemiology, which detracted from the overall strength of the book as a solid case study.
    • 5/5
      "It's true enough that the Victorians were grappling with heady issues like utilitarianism and class conciousness. But the finest minds of the era were also devoted to an equally pressing question: What are we going to do with all this shit?"Somewhere around chapter two I realized this is a book about shit. And that's ok. It turns out it's something that needs addressing once you start packing enormous qualtities of people (who are very good at making shit) into a comparatively small area (like Victorian London). Victorian London saw an insane population explosion (brought on by industrialization I believe) for which it had neither the square footage nor the infrastructure to support. With gross class disparity this meant millions of poor were packed into squalid neighborhoods basically living on top of each other. Technology had come far enough to make water closets a thing, but even if you had one they just drained to your cesspool or your basement, yard or whatever public space it encroached on if you were too cheap to have the nightsoil-men empty said cesspool. A lot of people were too cheap, or just couldn't afford it. Hell, plenty of people just emptied their filth out the window.As you might expect this created an enviroment less romantic than you probably imagined the last time you saw or read a story placed in Victorian London. It was just really shitty. Really Shitty. And then they started dumping the waste in the Thames to try and get rid of the fetid stink...you see where this is going?Cholera is normally a little bacterium that knocks out a humdrum existence living on plankton or something. But you introduce it to the human digestive system and it loses its mind (so to speak). Once it hits your small intestine it produces a chemical that tricks the human body into endlessly dispelling its water into the intestines while the bacterium replicates itself in the trillions. People can lose as much as 30% of their body's water in a single day. A person can go from perfectly healthy to cadverous in a day. Or dead. I'm not sure I ever heard of a disease that can tear down a human body as quickly as cholera. Thankfully because cholera has to be introduced to the digestive track one infection is unlikely to result in transmission...unless the cholera bacterium's wildest dreams comes true and it stumbles into a communtiy of humans that regularly ingest each other's fecal matter.So non existent waste disposal + ground water = ground water you don't want to ingestThis seems obvious today, but Victorian Londoners didn't have a lot of options at their disposal and no one had a goddamn idea what caused disease anyway. Ok, they had ideas...but they were wrong. In fact the primary theory of the time, that they were caused by miasma (bad smells/air), was actually the basis for the decision to turn the Thames into a sewer (they thought it would help the smell).So this was the situation that paved the way for London's brutal cholera epidemic. Johnson's book primarily follows two men, a scientist and a clergy man, who, initially on the ground independently with dispart theories regarding the epidemic eventually came together to uncover the source of the disease and it's means of transmision. Honestly it reads like a mystery. Without any knowedge of the existence bacteria or means of actually seeing it the two were none the less able to track it and deduct it's means if transmission with their exhaustive boot leather investigation of the neighborhood, it's inhabitants and their habits.I've never appreciated sewers so much.
    • 5/5
      I really love this book, both in print and in the audio version. This story is fascinating and the picture it paints of science as a cooperative effort between the medical doctor and the vicar, or the professional and the citizen is an important counter to our over-emphasis on professional science in modern times. Now, cholera is not really scary to westerners, what with the easy access to re-hydration via electrolyte enhanced liquids and intravenous fluids. Johnson paints a picture that is surely much more familiar to people in developing countries and which was familiar to our ancestors of a disease which could (and still can) wipe out entire families in a few days. It's a frightening image, made even more so when you realize there was no real idea of the cause of the disease or of how to treat it.The tenacity and caring shown by these two men, and many others who were pursuing false leads with no less commitment, is inspirational. The science is fascinating. The story is told in such a way that the reader feels true sorrow for those who died and those who survived them and true admiration for the sheer endurance required to live in London in the 1840s.The audio book is well read, with few mispronunciations and a good cadence and attention to sentence structure. I found I noticed different things in the audio book and in the text book - reading and hearing complement each other well in this book, though you can easily enjoy just one of the formats.Strongly recommended.
    • 4/5
      I really liked most of it. The end, where the author starts talking about modern urbanization, I found a bit repetitive at times and not anywhere near as interesting.
    • 4/5
      In 1854, London suffered a terrible cholera epidemic in the area around Broad Street. This is the story of its investigation, primarily by anesthetist Dr. John Snow and local curate Rev. Henry Whitehead. This took place before the germ theory of disease had really caught on, with many believing in the miasma theory - that is, that disease was caused by bad air. Snow's assertion that cholera is a waterborne pathogen was met with heavy resistance. In addition, Snow's map of cholera deaths was groundbreaking in the fields of information design and epidemiology. There were definitely parts of this book you don't want to read while eating - cholera is a nasty disease and sewers aren't exactly the most appetizing of subjects - but all in all it's a fascinating discussion of the event and subsequent study. Books like this are my favorite mode of learning.
    • 4/5
      The Ghost Map by Seven Johnson tells a story many Americans know from their high school geography books. During the first half of the nineteenth century the city of London was subjected to a series of deadly Cholera outbreaks. No one knew for certain how Cholera was spread, though people at the time believed in the miasma theory, which stated that cholera was a result of breathing bad air and having a weak constitution. Dr. John Snow believed the disease was spread by contact with human waste through contaminated drinking water. To prove his case, he plotted out the Cholera deaths during The Broad Street outbreak. The resulting map clearly showed that those using the Broad Street water pump were dying from Cholera. The pump was shut down, the outbreak ended, and it became clear to everyone that Cholera was spread by contact with human waste, not by bad air.I doubt that many people will be surprised to learn that their geography books have the story only partially correct. Dr. Snow did investigate the deaths in the neighborhood of the Broad Street pump, he did establish that Cholera was spread by contact with the pump's water, and eventually this did lead to the end of the miasma theory of contamination. But his famous map was not the cause of it all; rather it was the result, a product of a long term study produced after the outbreak had ended.There is much more to Steven Johnson's book The Ghost Map. In fact, the map itself plays only a very small part in Mr. Johnson's story. Like many popular histories, The Ghost Map takes a well known product and examines it from all angles, covers its long period of development, taking a look at a wide range of history along the way. The reader learns much about the development of cities, human evolution and adaptations to urban living, how the Broad Street neighborhood came to be and what it was like to live there in the early 19th century as well as an interesting history of epidemiology and urban plumbing. Much of the book describes 19th century plumbing, both into and out of the many homes in London. This is not reading suitable for the squeamish, but it certainly makes one appreciate just how far civilization has come. There were indoor flush toilets, for example, but they simply flushed waste into the basement or onto the streets in front of people's homes. Don't have a toilet or a drain in your sink, just throw your waste out the front door. No matter that the local water pump is right there, separated from a nearby cesspool by just a crumbling brick wall. Enter Dr. John Snow, who really should be a household name. Personal physician to the queen and a pioneer in the use of anesthesia, he followed the spread of Cholera has a sideline. He knew there was little proof to support the miasma theory of contagion but he was almost alone in this belief. He personally went from door to door throughout the Broad Street neighborhood, taking down lengthy interviews with everyone, both victim and survivor, to trace just who drank from the pump and who didn't and whether or not they later became sick with Cholera. There is some suspense in Steve Johnson's telling, so I'll go no further here, expect to say that the results of Dr. Snow's work, led not only to the end of Cholera outbreaks but to the modern systems of urban plumbing we now enjoy. Say what you will about the water you're drinking, it does not come from where it ends up anymore. That was not true in Dr. Snow's day.Towards the end of The Ghost Map the story does begin to run out of steam a bit. Mr. Johnson attempts to bring the issues into the present in his concluding chapters, but this material is not as strong as the earlier historical sections. In spite of this, I found The Ghost Map to be fascinating reading and am giving it four out of five stars
    • 3/5
      Oddly, I felt it needed more maps.