The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World in Not Exceeding Ten Miles Square

Jan 28, 2025 ambyr rated it liked it · review of another edition

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As history, this is a delightfully readable narrative account that pulls on a convincing array of primary sources to add context and detail to the basic, often-repeated chestnut that John Snow Removed The Pump Handle At Broad Street And Stopped The Cholera Epidemic. (The pump-handle removal was important symbolism, Johnson argues, but the epidemic had already stopped days before on its own; the essential parts of the story are the investigations conducted by Johnson and others before and after t As history, this is a delightfully readable narrative account that pulls on a convincing array of primary sources to add context and detail to the basic, often-repeated chestnut that John Snow Removed The Pump Handle At Broad Street And Stopped The Cholera Epidemic. (The pump-handle removal was important symbolism, Johnson argues, but the epidemic had already stopped days before on its own; the essential parts of the story are the investigations conducted by Johnson and others before and after that moment.)

So why three stars instead of four? Two reasons. One, the book is burdened by more endings than The Lord of the Rings, conclusion followed by epilogue followed by etc., and frankly I advise reading none of them. Johnson is a splendid historian but a poor futurologist; his predictions from the original 2006 edition have aged poorly, and I can't imagine the ones from the 2024 reprint will do any better.

Two, there's a paragraph that stopped me in my tracks, and I am just going to quote it here:

The descendants of the hunter-gatherers--like many Native Americans or Australian Aborigins--were never forced through this genetic bottleneck, and so today they show disproportionate rates of alcoholism. The chronic drinking problem in Native American populations has been blamed on everything from the weak 'Indian constitution' to the humiliating abuses of the U.S. reservation system. But their alcohol intolerance most likely has another explanation: their ancestors didn't live in towns.

This is what's known as the Firewater Myth. It is errant, racist nonsense, no more scientific than the miasmism that John Snow spent his life fighting against. No one has ever found evidence that Native Americans have any specific genetic propensity toward alcoholism. And yet Johnson repeats it glibly, not even bothering to cite a source. On the one hand, this is disappointing, and it makes me question every other assertion Johnson makes that isn't already familiar to me from other sources. On the other hand . . . on the other hand, I guess there's a certain thematic resonance in a book about how hard it is to achieve paradigmatic shifts in scientific knowledge demonstrating in its very own pages how deeply ideas can take root despite the evidence against them. I should question bald assertions; I should want to cross-check them against other sources. We all should, every day of our lives. John Snow would want nothing less. ...more

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