The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World.

• Author: O'Reilly, Marie
• Position: Further Reading - Book review

THE GHOST MAP: THE STORY OF LONDON'S MOST TERRIFYING EPIDEMIC--AND HOW IT CHANGED SCIENCE, CITIES, AND THE MODERN WORLD

Steven Johnson

(New York: Riverhead Books, 2006), 229 pages.

Steven Johnson offers a dynamic account of a historic success story in urban development that is instructive for present-day efforts, which often overemphasize blanket technical solutions without addressing the context in which they are implemented. A distinguished writer in residence at New York University, Johnson takes his readers on a fascinating journey through 19th century London, recounting the quest to solve one of the era's greatest threats to urban society: cholera. As four lethal epidemics swept through England over the course of the century, the swift and deadly disease thrived amid the squalor and overcrowding brought about by the new phenomenon of the metropolis.

The dominant intellectual paradigm of the time dictated that cholera was spreading through miasma--noxious vapors rising from the festering mounds of urban dwellers' waste. One astute scientist looked beyond the limits of this theory. Combining scientific and humanistic approaches, Dr. John Snow solved the mystery of cholera transmission and ultimately saved lives by examining the pathology of the disease at the individual level, personally investigating the patterns of its spread in the streets of his London neighborhood, and using nascent citywide statistics to survey the outbreak...