The Ghost Map By Steven Johnson

In the summer of 1854, London was coming out as one of the most modern cities in the world. With nearly 2.4 million people living in the area at the time, the city’s infrastructure itself was having a hard time providing for the basic needs of its residents. The biggest problem existing within the city at that time was its waste removal system, or for better terms, its lack of one. Human waste was piling up everywhere, from people houses to the rivers and drinking water. This situation was the perfect breeding conditions for a number of diseases, and towards the end of that summer, one of the most deadly of them all took over. It took the work of both a physician and a local minister in order to discover the mysterious cause of the

In the horror/mystery book Took: A Ghost Story by Mary Downing Hahn, Daniel, his little sister Erica, and their parents had just moved to Pennsylvania from Connecticut. The rumors about their new house are that every seventy years a girl disappears and another girl appears from what Brody Mason has told Daniel and Erica . Before they moved, their parents gave Erica a doll which she instantly admires. One afternoon Daniel and Erica go on a hike in the woods. Erica failed to keep her doll in her arms and loses it. The next day Erica is missing and another girl appears. What readers would find interesting is that Daniel never stopped believing that he will find his sister. If you are interested in a horror/mystery book that will keep you on the

Meanwhile, in London in the Middle Ages, if there was a major epidemic it was more than likely that you would die a horrible death. The Black Death wiped out 1,000,000 people in Britain alone. There was however, hope. An early form of what we call welfare today developed. Poor people couldn’t afford to see a doctor. A single doctor's fee was usually about a month's wages for a laborer. For the utterly impoverished, a common alternative was the local apothecary.

The word “plague” is defined as a contagious bacterial disease characterized by fever and delirium, typically with the formation of buboes, and sometimes infection of the lungs. The article entitled, “On the Progress of the Black Death”, written by Jean de Venette, a French Carmelite friar who was a leading clergyman around Paris at the time of the Black Death, is a well-known account of the spread of the plague in Northern Europe. In this account, Jean de Venette explained the history of the plague, its causes and its consequences.

I chose to read The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How it Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World. I found this book especially compelling because most people have never even heard of the cholera epidemic in London in 1854, nor its impacts on the cleanliness of today’s society. In his book, Stephen Johnson explained how in 1854, everyone living in London thought that all disease was spread through foul-smelling air (miasma). John Snow, a local doctor in London, wanted to know why so many people were dying of cholera, and others were not. He was the one that originally discovered that the epidemic was surrounded around a water pump on Broad Street, and Henry Whitehead was the one who proved that he right

Chapter One of of Jim Murphy’s book, An American Plague, opens with the quote, ‘About this time, this destroying scourge, the malignant fever, crept in among us” (Murphy 1). This quote is accredited to Mathew Carey in November, 1793. The term scourge is defined as, “a person or thing that cause great trouble of suffering,” and the term malignant is defined as, “tending to produce death or deterioration.” These are very strong terms with extremely negative connotative meanings. The figurative language which is evident in the quote at the opening of Chapter One is personification. Carey’s quote give yellow fever an eerie, human-like quality when he writes, “the destroying scourge, the malignant fever, CREPT in among us” (Murphy 1). CArey’s word choices and use of personification help to create a powerful image in the reader’s mind of the threat looming over the city of Philadelphia.\

In American industrial cities, late 1800s, Poor neighborhood were not the best place to live. With poor living conditions, poor sanitation and crowded housing, many epidemics of infectious disease spread into the poor population and touched even the wealthy class. Cities such as New York were crowded and workers were living in tenements, which were often cramped, poorly lit and poorly aerated. Moreover, these tenements lacked of adequate plumbing, therefore waste was flooding in the public streets. Streets was crowded of waste and garbage. Population was poorly nourished and has a poor life hygiene like water pollution and poisoned food and milk. Accordingly, infectious disease was the common death reason. Big cities had known outbreaks of

Geraldine Brook’s novel, Year of Wonders is based on a true story which recounts a 17th Century Plague, which struck the English village of Eyam and put many in strife. The story revolves around the protagonist, Anna Frith as she develops strength throughout the novel from being a maid in the beginning of the novel and eventually becomes a midwife. Similarly, Steven Soderbergh’s Film, Contagion is set in 21st Century America, which narrates the epidemic of the MEV1 virus, which causes dispute amongst many characters and has a manipulative effect on the characters in the film. In both the text and the novel, Diseases not only attack individuals but also causes the breakdown in society. Diseases cause the greed and the want for money in some characters, which has a huge impact on society as a whole. Similarly, diseases cause the need for self-preservation in order to survive. On the other hand, diseases cause characters to lose faith.

On the other end of the society scale, the working poor were working and living in unbearable conditions. There were no irrigation systems, running water or any way of preserving hygiene in the homes or the factories. The working poor lived in slums and tenements which were breeding grounds for diseases. In the book, “The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844” by Friedrich Engels, he states, “...at the end of the covered passage, a privy without a door, so dirty that the inhabitants can pass into and out of the court only by passing through foul pools of stagnant urine and excrement.” (page 78)1. This gives us a peek into the horrible unsanitary conditions that the working class were forced to endure while the business owners were living in beautiful mansions and summer houses.

Snow, a man from the modest home of a labourer, uncommon roots for the men in his profession, made exceptional discoveries which were found by using the most novel thinking and common surveyor’s techniques. He was the first to consider the waterborne theory of cholera and looked at the outbreak from a street and a birds-eye view which in the end allowed him to see the patterns of the outbreak. Whitehead was the local curate who had a first-hand look at the lives of those who were affected by this deadly pathogen. It was he who, spurred on by disprove Snow’s claims, found the crucial evidence that in the end solidified Snow’s theory. Farr was a man with a similar background to Snow, who collected much of the raw statistical data used by Snow to develop and then support his theory. Farr’s information also lead Snow to map out patterns of cholera deaths in the St. James region, creating the “Ghost Map”, an instrumental tool in the defense of his theory.

With lacking medical knowledge, people never really grasped the concept or the cause of this epidemic; therefore, they did not know what to do to help cure or stop the spread of it. “In spite of only sketchy medical knowledge, the epidemiology of the plague was fully understood by the 18th century. It took many years of research, after the fact, to finally comprehend all the ins

Ghostly representations of “the other” imagine a social evil that has not been put to rest. These images reoccur in the Western canon, marking the persistence of slavery long after its abolition. Haunting, ghosts and skeletons in Benito Cereno act as a vehicle through which the suppressed return to the stage with a message. The ghosts carry with them all that the imperialists wanted to control, including emotions, and more precisely, the emotions of the oppressed. I argue that ghosts and skeletons comprise an area of tension in which the appearance of the “other” reveals that the dominant party’s control is incomplete. Yet, the presence is merely ghostly due to the constant policing and lack of respect for the Other. These ghosts also break through the boundaries of the dominant culture’s paradigms and identities (Harpham 17), signaling potential political crisis. This text signals the fear of the retaliation of the Other through ghostly representations by projecting on to the other, their own identities of brutality and irrationality. “Benito Cereno” by Herman Melville overturns the racist images of the colonized by relocating evil in the order of slavery. Hauntings carry the perspectives and powers of the slaves by preserving the dead amidst the living and the past amidst the present, they muddle up the concept of time and therefore defy the Western dream of complete control.

Although cholera is now well-documented and curable, for those in the nineteenth century the disease was frightening and unexplainable; symptoms occurred rapidly and were followed by a torturous death. Although naval ships had undergone substantial reforms by the nineteenth century, unresolved issues of overcrowding, limited clean resources and

Amid the nineteenth century, a few pandemics of cholera began from India and spread to Western nations (Kanungo & Sur, 2012). According to Ali, Nelson, Lopez, and Sack, cholera is a genuine general wellbeing issue in creating nations. Cholera can bring about scourges in populations. It can be an epidemic in populations next to zero or regular invulnerability, frequently taking after normal catastrophes amid which the nature of water and sanitation can be traded off (Kim, Mogasale, Burgess and Wierzba, 2015). As stated by Clemens, the bacteria Vibrio cholera that causes cholera disease can be transferred from person to another person by fecal oral route, contaminated water, poor sanitation and hygiene (Kim, Mogasale, Burgess and Wierzba, 2015). On the word of Carpenter, cholera is showed by easy intense watery loose bowels and heaving prompting life undermining drying out which may reason for death of the patient, if not treated immediately and sufficiently.

In 19th Century London was suffering very badly with the Cholera during that time Dr. John Snow was the member of the Royal college of Surgeons and he made significantly contributions to the medical research. That time people’s belief was dieses was the results of the evil’s behavior. At that time there were two theories for the notation for Cholera. First, Miasma theory which is opposed by Snow. Second, the germ theory which was accepted by Snow. Snows hypotheised that the Cholera spreaded due to the spoiled water. He also pointed out that the risk to catch the dieses depends on the people’s life style, work and contact with sick person, regular habits.