Croaker's review
The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World
by Steven Johnson
Croaker's review
The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson
Croaker's review
rating:
On August 28, 1854, working-class Londoner Sarah Lewis emptied a bucket of waste water into the cesspool of her squalid apartment building and triggered the deadliest outbreak of cholera in the city's history. A Victorian city with more than 2 million people packed into a ten-mile circumference. This is the story of two men: Dr. John Snow who pioneered the use of ether as an anesthetic in the United Kingdom, and on a personal note, mentions the first medical use of ether by Dr. William Morton; and the Reverend Henry Whitehead, an Oxford-educated young man whose Anglican calling did nothing to abate his fondness for London taverns.
The book begins with a description of London as a city of scavengers: bone-pickers, rag-gatherers, pure-finders, dredgermen, mud-larks, sewer-hunters, dustmen, night-soil men, bunters, toshers and shoremen. Against this backdrop of vile and ghastly smells, and in the face of a horrifying epidemic, Snow posited the then radical theory that cholera was...more
The book begins with a description of London as a city of scavengers: bone-pickers, rag-gatherers, pure-finders, dredgermen, mud-larks, sewer-hunters, dustmen, night-soil men, bunters, toshers and shoremen. Against this backdrop of vile and ghastly smells, and in the face of a horrifying epidemic, Snow posited the then radical theory that cholera was...more
