The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson

The work of these two men changed the contemporary views on how disease was spread. By solving the cholera mystery, they helped contribute to making the world safe for bigger cities. Over the next few years a lot of changes were made. Both the medical and public health establishments latched onto Snow’s waterborne theory and through one of the greatest feats in engineering history, London started the process of making an entirely new sewer system. This, along with other precautions such as boiling water that was suspected to be contaminated, brought an end to city-wide choleric outbreaks. Besides the improvements in sewage, the improvements of sanitary conditions all around greatly diminished the spread of disease and held a major part in making the modern city possible. Overall, it turned out that something that was once horrendous and deadly for a massive amount of people, eventually turned out to be helpful for the future of mankind. (Johnson)

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

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

Why acknowledge history? The solution is because we essentially must to achieve access to the laboratory of human involvement. In the essay “Haunted America”, Patricia Nelson takes a truly various and remarkably gallant stance on United States history. Through the recounting of the White/Modoc war in “Haunted America,” she brings to light the complexity and confusion of the White/Indian conflicts that is often missing in much of the history we read. Her account of the war, with the faults of both Whites and Indians revealed, is an unusual alternative to the stereotypical “Whites were good; Indians were bad” or the reverse stand point that “Indians were good; Whites were bad” conclusions that many historians reach. Limerick argues that a very brutal and bloody era has been simplified and romanticized, reducing the lives and deaths of hundreds to the telling of an uncomplicated story of “Good Guys” and “Bad Guys”.

John Snow, main character in Ghost Map, embodies traits of persistence and intelligence throughout his exploration of Cholera. He not only expressed persistence in his field studies but in not giving up when people doubted. In the book, John Snow wants to talk to people in Cholera ridden areas. His hypothesis states that Cholera spread through water, not air, yet his theory at the time remained partially unproven. “Later, Snow would visit the Eley Brothers factory, where he found the situation much more dire.” (143) The case’s evidence lie like berries on a tree and John Snow played the hungry, persistent woodpecker pecking away to get them, no matter what obstacles might stand in his way. A normal person would not put themselves in the place of danger but John Snow did.

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.

The first time I thought of medicine as a culture was as an undergraduate reading “The Ghost Map” (Johnson, 2006). The book followed the work of Dr. John Snow, a major figure in the field of epidemiology. Snow lived in London during the time of large scale cholera outbreaks in Europe. At the time the school of thought was that cholera was the product of “moral failings” on the part of individuals, as cholera disproportionately hit economically marginalized communities. Another prevailing theory involved the concept of “miasma”; in other words, that an element of the air was to blame for the surge in cholera. Snow realized through his visits to houses hit by cholera that poor sanitation in local water supplies was the causative

Due to my interest in medicine, I chose to read The Lassa Ward: One Man’s Fight Against One of the World’s Deadliest Diseases for the AP Human Geography summer assignment. The Lassa Ward is authored by Ross I. Donaldson, who is a physician specializing in public health and tropical medicine. St. Martin’s Press, headquartered in New York, NY, published the novel in 2009. Dr. Donaldson’s memoir focuses on how he treated Lassa cases in Sierra Leone, in the midst of an outbreak of the virus during the summer months of 2003. Thus, The Lassa Ward captivatingly communicates the improvements needed in the current medical system in third-world Sierra Leone through its detailed description regarding the primitive condition of medicine, the culture of

Conversely, the visitor ousts the scientist’s ability to scrutinize him and this conflict is what drives the plot of the story. To begin, the bacteriologist inductively analyzes the visitors’ reaction to the cholera by using words like “the pale-faced man, with a limp white hand and disengaged eye” (page 1) Proceeding, the visitor quotes “...those mere autonomies might multiply and devastate a city! Wonderful!” (page. 1) This deductively concludes for the bacteriologists that this strange man had gruesome thoughts and poor intentions, leading to the scientists’ beginning hypothesis... "Once he brought the bottled cholera he saw the the gleam of satisfaction coming from the visitor."

Far Far Away, is a Ghost story written by Tom McNeal with 368 pages. The main character or, (protagonist) is Jeremy Johnson, a teenager who has the ability to interact with those on Zwischenraum, a spirit plane between the living and the afterlife. The narrator is one of these spirits, Jacob Grimm who has been dead since the Saturday afternoon of September 1863. He is sent to look over or protect Jeremy from the Finder of Occasions, a villain whose intentions aren’t clear.

Cholera is a disastrous and horrifying disease that has killed over 10,000 people. This Cholera disease paper includes the dangerous- painful symptoms, successful vaccines, a personal survival story, and the great future for this disease. Cholera is, ‘’an infectious and often fatal bacterial bacterial disease of the small intestine, typically contracted from infected water supplies and causing severe vomiting and diarrhea,’’(https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=what+is+cholera). Some reports in India as early as 1000 A.D have been reported that was thought they had a cholera-like disease but was not. Dr. Snow wasn’t the one to discover Cholera but he did show how the disease could be spread and stop it from becoming a local outbreak so he is

In his novel The Plague Camus creates characters who are forced to think, reflect, and assume responsibility for living as they battle an epidemic of bubonic plague that is ravaging the Algerian port of Oran. For ten months as the outbreak isolates the city from the rest of the world, each of the citizens reacts in a unique way. Camus’ main characters undergo both individual and social transformations.

The dark year of 1620 had been the birth of the local devil. One far more callous in nature than anybody currently living in the town, perhaps even the country. Matthew Hopkins, the self-professed, Witchfinder General. Responsible for the deaths of more than two-hundred innocents, who 'd been deemed undesirable by their neighbours and families. East Anglia, at the time, had been riddled with persecution, victimisation and the ceaseless suffering of many, more so during Hopkins notorious reign than at any other point in time.

Across the world in New York, a physician named John Snow founded the idea that cholera was not being spread through the air, but through soiled water in 1813. Once again, he too would face multiple years of push back from colleagues who did not believe that this deadly disease was in the water. As the industrial revolution sparked an eruption of mass spreading of cholera, the invention of steamboats took the isolated pandemic across the seas to the America’s well into the twentieth century. Although advances in technology and medicine have almost abolished cholera in western civilizations, underdeveloped countries in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean are still being ravaged by the virulent disease. Over the decades the diarrheal bacteria have evolved and developed new strands since the first outbreak in the 1800’s. Today cholera still accounts for 1.4 to 43 million of cases of diarrheal infections globally.

The Ghost Map written by Steven Johnson was “the story of London’s most terrifying epidemic and how it changed science, cities, and the modern world.” The central question that was researched included the cause and effect of the deadly disease Cholera. The outcome of what they discovered was causing this epidemic changed how future science evolved in the discovering of the causes of disease as well as how large cities could develop safely.