Summary Of The Ghost Map

Stephen Johnson’s The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, is a nonfiction book that examines the cholera outbreak that occurred in the late summer of 1854 in London, England. At that time, London was the largest city that the world had seen, with a population of around two and a half million. It was the size of many modern cities but didn’t share any of the infrastructure that are so vital to larger cities, like clean water distribution or a waste removal system. This lack of infrastructure caused an emergence of a class of scavenger people to deal with the refuse of the city. Wading through sewage and garbage, they would collect, reuse, recycle, and then sell what they could from the various types of waste products.
The illness quickly spread from that residence to the rest of the neighborhood, resulting in around ten percent of its population dying from the disease within a week’s time. The book primarily centers on the efforts made by the two primary protagonists Dr. John Snow and Reverend Henry Whitehead, to identify the source of the outbreak. Both of these men had extensively worked with the poor of the city, each bringing something unique to the investigation. Snow brought his knowledge on various medical and intellectual fields, and Whitehead brought his social knowledge on the residents of the area. While the two are initially at odds on the cause of the outbreak, they eventually end up agreeing with one another, believing that the outbreak had been caused by the contamination of the Broad Street