Quick Review: The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson

I recently finished Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. It brought together various interests and obsessions of mine—19th century culture, information design, urban life and infrastructure—and wrapped them in a narrative that is part detective story, part biology lesson and part Dickens novel.

The background is Victorian London, which was expanding at an alarming scale. The city and its inhabitants faced many challenges, but perhaps most serious was the problem of what to do with the enormous quantities of raw sewage generated by so many people and animals packed together in unprecedented density. At one point the River Thames stank so mightily that Parliament closed.

Johnson teases out the economy that formed around the disposal of London’s voluminous byproduct in detail. The foot soldiers in this war on sewage were known by their specialties: pure-finders, bone-pickers, night-soil men and toshers. Pure-finders specialized in dog excrement, which they collected and sold to tanners who used it to “purify” leather.

In 1854, a deadly cholera outbreak swept through London’s Soho. It was not the first cholera outbreak, and it wouldn’t be the last, but it was significant in that two men, Dr. John Snow and the Reverend Henry Whitehead, began separate inquiries into the cause of the outbreak. Snow was determined to prove that the disease was waterborne, an opinion that was rejected by the scientific establishment. Whitehead, driven by a concern for his parishioners, was enlisted to disprove Snow.

They would eventually merge efforts, and the Ghost Map itself was a visual representation of their work that helped to establish patterns among those struck down by Vibrio cholerae, and change contemporary views on the spread of disease. As a result, public health reforms made cities livable in a very literal sense—improvements in sewage and sanitation eliminated conditions that generate epidemics of disease, making the modern city possible.

Yet cholera, and the conditions that enable it to spread, have not gone away. Johnson draws some interesting conclusions about the impact of the Ghost Map, the future of urban living and the sustainability of life on this planet.

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