The Ghost Map Get it now!

It's a fascinating and dramatically embellished account of the 1854 Cholera outbreak in the Soho neighborhood of central London. Aside from the dramatic effects, Johnson claims that his telling of the outbreak is completely and historically accurate, and I believe him.

The story, above all, is an account of a mind-boggling lack of imagination on the part of the public health officials of the time. Johnson is kind to them. He explains the context of scientific thought and culture leading up to the 19th-century outbreaks, and he makes a case for a sort of confirmation bias and tunnel-visioned cultural attitude that locked the bulk of the scientific community into the miasmatic view of the Cholera problem.

The detective story is of a rogue physician and a local curate who eventually (and in one case, posthumously) convince the medical community that Cholera was spreading through the water system (germ theory), rather than through the air (miasma theory). Naturally, I was left wondering what biases are clouding our vision now, which is, I think, part of Johnson's point. The other point seems to be a stern warning about the nature of epidemics and of the potentially much more serious pandemic threats that may come to fruition in our lifetimes. His explanation of the H5N1 problem kept me up late.

What's most remarkable about this book is that it draws the lines to connect the number of completely different disciplines that it took to overcome London's Cholera problem. The story celebrates the combined human geniuses of epidemiology, cartography, statistics, and structural engineering. Above all, it celebrates the local members of communities and the richness and value of their knowledge. He connects the curate's local knowledge of Soho and the resulting Ghost Map, which arguably ended the epidemic, to Google's local restaurant reviews--a modern manifestation of local knowledge laid out cartographically.Get more detail about The Ghost Map.