The Ghost Map
Steven Johnson Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 300pp, £16.99
ISBN 0713999748
In late August 1854, a Soho resident threw the dirty water from her ailing baby's nappies into the cesspool outside her house, from which bacteria infiltrated the nearby Broad Street pump. Ten days later, the neighbourhood had lost hundreds of its inhabitants to the most unbridled cholera epidemic witnessed by Victorian London. But it took much longer, and the inverting of the era's prevailing wisdom, for the cause to be traced back to this small action.
Physician John Snow, convinced that cholera was something you swallowed, as opposed to the miasma in which the capital's poor lived, had a difficult task ahead. His ideas were never accepted by the then Board of Health, but by reproducing the paths walked by the Soho residents (the Ghost Map), he was able to show the clusters of deaths linked by one factor alone: water from the Broad Street pump.
Steven Johnson's book provides a vivid and gripping account of the outbreak of 1884, as well as the state of public health during the late 19th century. He theorises on the relationship between urban living and the opportunities, both good and bad, it entails. But what is most enthralling is the way in which he interweaves seemingly self-contained disciplines and renders the cholera episode relevant to modern urban life.
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