Essay The Ghost Map

Then he reexamined the water sample again, he saw some unusual particles in the water under microscope. Then he decided to change the format of his approach from the pattern of the lives and death on the street of Golden Square. “Snow had continued looking for evidence supporting this theory.” (Johnson, 100) Many other scientists were not believed that cholera is a waterborne disease. John Snow tried to collect data by knocking door, asking strangers in the street, visit Registrar-General’s Office to get calculated numbers for the week. His survey of the neighborhood data had become the Ghost Map. What was happening below the ground, we had no

It is hard to imagine in the twenty first century the level of filth that was experienced in the 1830’s on a daily basis. Sanitation, public health and sewer systems were problems that gripped the nation throughout the ninetieth century (1830-1860s), encouraging popular debate and proposal of changes. The growth of population and increase in the industry

He linked the common illness cholera to people whom drank from the wells. He observed those getting ill and which areas and pumps they drank from and recorded it on a map, he was then able to establish all those getting ill were in fact drinking from the same pump, and consequently in 1854 John Snow removed the handle of the Broad Street pump and ceased the epidemic of Cholera in Soho, London

The book I chose for my Theme Project is Breathe: A Ghost Story by Cliff McNish. In his new rural house, a young boy with a dead father begins sensing ghosts of children, and a mother, in the house. The Ghost Mother meets Jack and offers to become his mother, and he accepts. But when he finds out that the mother has been doing horrible things to the Ghost Children, and killed her daughter, she resorts to possessing his mother. She slowly kills off the four children, sending them to the hellish Nightmare Passage. After sitting down once, the boy communicates with the daughter on the Other Side. She tells of how her death from pneumonia drove the mother to suicide, and refused to go with her loved ones to the Other Side. Finally, with

One of its biggest strength was the way the author used his great sense of imagery to create depictions of life in 1854. The book had many descriptions for the places and people. And the author never failed to mention the stench in the city. Another strength that the book had was that it tied in many genres. Science, mystery, and it included innovation as well. The Ghost Map tells a story of a very innovative time. Dr. Snow and Reverend Whitehead were able to work together to identify a disease and its source without having any modern

The book The Ghost Map: The story of London’s most terrifying epidemic—and how it changed science, cities, and the modern world” by Steven Johnson is about the 1854 cholera epidemic in London. There were no sewage systems to get rid of waste in London at the time, so the people would throw their untreated wastes into the Thames River and pits called cesspools. This increased with the invention and popularization on the water closet, which drained even more wastes into the cesspools. This way of ridding of wastes then proceeded to contaminate the city’s water supply and spread diseases faster. During the summer of 1854, the mother of a sick baby, baby Lewis, washed her child’s soiled cloth diapers in a bucket of water that she poured into the house’s cesspool cellar, starting the cholera epidemic. Coming into contact with the contaminated water led many of the city’s people to contract the disease and die.

The Ghost map, written by Steven Johnson and published in 2006, was about an outbreak of cholera because of the lack of sanitation. A five-month-old girl began the outbreak of 1854 when she fell ill from water drawn from a public pump in the city square. Her mother washed out her clothing and dumped the water into the cesspool, spreading the cholera bacteria into the river where it then contaminated the drinking water. This book is a tale of how two men changed the course of the largest city ever built in the world at that time in history.

Steven Johnson provides a thought-provoking observation of the bacterial disease cholera in his book The Ghost Map. He explores the means by which the deadly Vibrio Cholorae was able to devastate a developing section of London in only a week’s time at the start of September in 1854. Johnson offers details on the development of cities, which supplied the perfect environment for the bacterium to thrive and kill off thousands of people in weeks. Before the 1854 epidemic, Cholera was an unidentifiable mystery to the scientists and thinkers of London. Theories of how the illness spread and how it was to be cured varied extensively, each concept with its own unwavering supporters eager to spread their ideas while debunking others. In The Ghost Map, Johnson tells the

In the book of The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson, there are four protagonist who are Doctor John Snow, Reverend Henry Whitehead, Cholera, and London. London is known for being sophisticated and far advance than most cities in the 1800s. London was a city where population density doubles within years. In the book, Johnson refers London as a character even though it not a human, but rather an identity to represent every single human that lives within London. For Cholera to exist it needed London’s population density to expand rapidly.

Sewage would only worsen the issues of the Victorian Era making it terribly inferior to many citizens of London. Hospitals were not the only problem because the disposal of waste might have been just as evenly bad. “How to dispose of the accumulated waste was a problem that preoccupied the minds of countless reformers, engineers, scientists, and amateur sanitarians, but the problem acquired a particular urgency because the retention of waste in the city was associated with disease and even death…” (Cleansing the City p. 9-10). Many places in London had terrible sewage issues and it became evident that the sewage was so bad because no one knew how to dispose of the waste. The waste was very dangerous and many people did not want to deal with it due to the many diseases and bad liabilities carried with it. The nineteenth century needed a sanitary reform right away because in many places like London were being taken over and run by sanitation issues. “Together the two passages reveal the heightened symbolism of filth in the period and, more specifically, the way filth embodied the challenges of the urban condition. Indeed, sanitary discourse became an important vehicle for expressing concerns about the disorder associated with the Victorian city” (Cleansing the City p. 14). The following two passages the author is referring to are from Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens, an influential writer of the Victorian Era. London was literally demanding change because the sanitary reform

Great Britain in the early 1800s was not the pleasant place we know today. There was garbage rotting on the streets, waste tossed out windows or into the River Thames, London’s supply of clean drinking water (or so they thought), and was unhealthily overpopulated due to the growth of industry caused by the invention of the steam engine. Especially in cities, households were tightly packed and overcrowded, allowing infectious diseases and bacteria to spread rapidly. Open drains and sewers flowed alongside unpaved streets while inadequate toilet facilities overflowed and seeped into cellar dwellings. The air was filthy; it was filled with the stench of rotting

North’s paper exhibits a snapshot of his present, the two contain several parallels. The Cholera Years presents several scientific theories as to cholera’s cause that received traction in the medical world. Surprisingly, North’s account of cholera’s causes avoids the inclusion of a personal theory but relies on citing a variety of professional findings. For example, both North and Rosenberg cite Dr. Snow as a researcher focused on the matter of cholera, whose theory promoted cholera as transmissible through contaminated drinking water. North continued his discussion of contagion by citing other doctors such as Copeland, Watson, Britton, and Swayne, with each positing a slightly different angle to gain a more complete picture of cholera as a contagion (North 13-16). Rosenberg also produced a broad discussion on the status of cholera as a contagion with the works of sanitarians, such as Max von Pettenkofer, and foreign physicians, such as Dr. William Budd (Rosenberg 195-196). As a historian, Rosenberg includes broad strokes of this time period, which results in descriptions of theories opposed to the contagion theory. As such, Rosenberg notes the position of individuals such as John Griscom, Edwin Snow, and Henry Clark, who all spent their lives focusing on filth as the major cause of epidemics (Rosenberg 196). North generated a similar

As stated as in the text,”A mother washed her baby’s diaper in a town well in 1854 and touched off an epidemic that killed 616 people.” To explain, just because a mother washed her baby’s diaper in the well under the street it killed 616 people. Another piece of evidence from the text states,”Within 250 yards of the spot where Cambridge Street joins Broad Street there were upwards of 500 fatal attacks of cholera in 10 days.” That is to say that, only a little ways away, in 10 days, 500 people died from this sickness called

The video presented by Steven Johnson gives us a glimpse of a cholera outbreak that happened in the city of London during this time period. He begins by describing the living conditions in the early days of London. He mentions filth and refuse being thrown in the basement of houses and in the streets, he mentions livestock roaming freely, and he explicitly described the stench which was so abhorrent, that it was offensive just to walk around the city. Initially the emerging public health system believed that the stench was causing the disease thus they implemented the “nuisances act” an early public health intervention which instead of making things better just aggravated the problem.

Experts besides Snow at that time believed the outbreak to be due to, “vapors of swamps, or putrid matter that fouled the air.” (), Snow was the only one to believe it to be something more. Snow also created a “famous symbol for Public Health- the removal of the Broad Street pump” (), the removal was a major success, and fixed the majority of the 1854 Cholera epidemic apart from a few cases. He was smart, witty, and not afraid to follow his beliefs on the matter rather than just conforming to what everyone else was saying; he made major leaps in epidemiology, and that is what earned him the title of “the father of epidemiology.