The Ghost Map - Book Review

Good morning, and be thankful if you have access to clean drinking water. It hasn't always been that way.

I just finished The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson (2006).

Let's just say you don't want to get cholera, a bacterial disease that primarily spreads through contaminated water and wreaks havoc on the body by causing watery diarrhea until you die - if untreated. To learn more about cholera, I recommend listening to This Podcast Will Kill You - Season one, Episode four: The Poop Show.

I can credit TPWKY for sparking my interest in  learning more about infectious diseases of all sorts, which led to me picking up this book.

Ghost Map is about the 1854 London Broad Street outbreak, and the work of John Snow, a physician who worked tirelessly to investigate the cause. 

John Snow

Microscopy was in its earliest stages and germ theory was yet to be adopted as a cause of illness. The dominating theory of the time was that particles in the air caused disease. Miasmatists believed that bad smells equated illness, and that cholera struck in this manner.

Snow didn't buy into the miasma theory, and thought the outbreak was somehow connected to the water supply. The book details his work and the work of several others who eventually pinpointed the Broad Street pump as the source of the outbreak, which killed 616 people living in a small area of London.

The book starts by setting  the scene in 1854, with descriptions of the squalor many people lived in. It moves into detailed descriptions of what happens when someone has cholera and on to the story of Broad Street. It was fascinating, horrifying, and hard to put down!

The final section of the book brings things around to modern times and I'm afraid it lost a bit of its shine at this point. Johnson waxes on about the greatness of cities as a human social development, but ends up heading in a somewhat dark direction talking about the vulnerability to biologic and nuclear warfare. It veered into fantastical conjecture and went on a bit too long. It does make sense in a way, as Johnson lives in Brooklyn and was writing this book shortly after 9/11. Still, it could have been cut down to just a few paragraphs.

Despite the last bit, I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in history and/or infectious diseases. It reads like a mystery novel at times, and you'll learn things too!

Cholera bacteria (Vibrio cholerae)