Book Review: The Ghost Map
Today I’ll be reviewing The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson. (No, it’s not about pirates). I picked it up to read on the train the other day, and it’s a fantastic historical book about an 1800’s cholera epidemic. It sets up the neighborhood in London first by explaining the various scavengers — rag-pickers, bone collectors, scrap metal, as well as the people who worked specifically in the sewers (a job I only recently read about fictionally in The Quincunx by ).
But this book is about an actual epidemic. This book has cliff-hangers like any good detective story. It explores what the inhabitants of the neighborhood did for a living, what they ate and drank, and also the common medical beliefs of the day — humors, constitutions, miasmas — and the social class problem. I’m familiar with this terms and their medical meanings, but I haven’t seen a book explore them before by demonstrating how they were used in combination, and how this restricted the germ theory.
This actually makes sense because today we believe in the germ theory, that diseases can be transmitted by water, and that you must rehydrate yourself if you have a fever. I may have picked the wrong things to demonstrate, but the fact is that we don’t generally believe in these things are isolated from one another. Likewise, Johnson shows that the social bias of the time influenced how neighborhoods were built, which influenced where people got their water — which in their own minds reinforced the idea that the lower classes by their inferior constitutions (something like an immune system) and filthy habits which caused miasmas (bad smells which caused disease) — brought about their own deaths from cholera. It also explores how religion influenced medicine.
Like a detective story, this book shows how a doctor interpreted these events, how he set out to prove that cholera came from the water when folkloric medical beliefs suggested otherwise. He did two very important things — interviewing people about deaths and any details about their daily life, and making a map that showed not only where the cholera began and how it traveled but why. The maps adds sociology — and this I think is especially interesting, given that years later, in 1911, Popenoe’s eugenics textbook will still hold to the old ideas, that internal constitutions of poorer, schizophrenic patients make their deaths from consumption likely — not that the sociology and living conditions make the germs spread.
So this study of cholera was very much ahead of its time. The doctor in it sets out to prove cholera’s transmission through water against the commonly accepted disease theories of the time period. The author supports any theories mentioned by explaining thier history, but then goes back to the drama of the neighborhood’s inhabitants.
I liked this book and would highly recommend it, especially if you want to understand how people thought about disease transmission, about how Victorian cities were built, or what it was like to live and work in London. I’m surprised I have not heard of The Ghost Map before.