Cholera was once one of the most dreaded diseases in crowded early industrial cities. It claimed thousands of lives, sweeping away whole families in one epidemic after another.
Doctors were baffled by the causes of the deadly illness. Many blamed the bad odors so common in the unsanitary conditions of the time.
In “The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic – and How It Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World,” Steven Johnson sets forth the fascinating detective story that led a prominent physician and a neighborhood curate to unravel the mystery of the London cholera epidemic of 1854, showing the way to ending this particular plague and preventing future outbreaks.
The tale of Dr. John Snow and the Broad Street Pump is widely known in science and medical literature: He persuaded local authorities to remove the pump handle so people couldn’t draw water there, thus ending that cholera outbreak.
But Johnson enlivens the story, bringing Snow’s dour personality to life as he struggles to collect evidence for his theory that water was carrying the contamination.
But just being sure you are right isn’t enough in a time and place when the best medical minds and civic officials are just as positive that smells cause illness – you have to have proof.
Success in the end is aided by the affable clergyman Henry Whitehead, who thinks Snow is wrong and sets forth to collect evidence disproving the water theory. The worst of the epidemic is in Whitehead’s parish; he knows and has access to the people there, and can ask questions where Snow might not be able to get answers.
The more Whitehead delves into the epidemic, the more he is converted to Snow’s point of view, in the end contributing vital evidence to the case.
The ghost map of the title recalls a map of the part of London struck by cholera, with houses marked where people had died. It helped pinpoint the suspect water pump that was shared by so many unsuspecting people.
Johnson gives a riveting look at the power of belief to ignore or overlook new evidence, the struggle to overcome the syndrome that “everybody knows” that smell means illness, and the people on both sides of these debates.
In the end Snow, Whitehead and their followers led to improvements not just in London’s sewers, but in sanitation in other cities that has saved many lives.
This is the very readable story of how that began.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
