The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World in Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge

Sep 13, 2017 Rae rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: math-and-sciences, 2017

London, 1854. A horrific cholera epidemic. Ghost Map tells the story of the two men who find the source of the disease in a water pump on Broad Street. I was especially interested in the last third of the book, which looks at the episode from a modern-day point of view and places it in perspective.

Whitehead to Snow: You and I may not live to see the day, and my name may be forgotten when it comes; but the time will arrive when great outbreaks of cholera will be things of the past; and it is the ...more

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Apr 30, 2010 Shelley rated it really liked it

Shelves: history

This was fascinating. I'd known about cholera, of course (thanks, Oregon Trail), but not a lot of detail about what it was, what it did, where it came from, etc. I would have liked to learn a little more about it and the people who were part of this specific outbreak, but this focused mostly on the two men who used this week of horror to learn about what caused it and how to stop it. It's amazing what these two "armchair detectives" in 1854 learned and did. The last chapter, extrapolating the da ...more

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Dec 28, 2015 Julianne Dunn rated it liked it

Shelves: 2016-read-harder

This is between a 3 & 4 star book. Essentially the birth of public health, John Snow and Reverend Henry Whitehead's "discovery" of the origin of one of the worst cholera epidemics in 1854 by scientific deduction and comprehensive knowledge of the neighborhood and its patterns is fascinating. Johnson is clearly a lover of public health and its origins and inserts plenty of medical and scientific knowledge into the story.

The problems I have with this book, which loses points, is that it is a bit ...more

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