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Our bones are themselves the result of a recycling scheme pioneered by natural selection billions of years ago. All nucleated organisms generate excess calcium as a waste product. Since at least the Cambrian times, organisms have accumulated those calcium reserves, and put them to good use: building shells, teeth, skeletons.
The cherished diversity of the rain-forest ecosystem is not just a quaint case of biological multiculturalism. The diversity of the system is precisely why rain forests do such a brilliant job of capturing the energy that flows through them:
1840s and the 1850s, a thousand Londoners would typically die of cholera in a matter of weeks—in a city a quarter the size of present-day New York—and the deaths would barely warrant a headline. And so, as shocking as those numbers seem to us now, they may not have provoked the same mortal panic that they trigger today.
Chadwick helped solidify, if not outright invent, an ensemble of categories that we now take for granted: that the state should directly engage in protecting the health and well-being of its citizens, particularly the poorest among them; that a centralized bureaucracy of experts can solve societal problems that free markets either exacerbate or ignore; that public-health issues often require massive state investment in infrastructure or prevention.
It was theory that drew its persuasive power
not from any single fact but rather from its location at the intersection of so many separate but compatible elements, like a network of isolated streams that suddenly converges to form a river. The weight of tradition, the evolutionary history of disgust, technological limitations in microscopy, social prejudice—all these factors colluded to make it almost impossible for the Victorians to see miasma for the red herring that it was,
Snow’s breakthroughs in anesthesia had revolved around his polymath skills as a physician, researcher, and inventor. But his cholera theory would ultimately depend on his skills as a sociologist.
Nor is it merely a question of building on precedent, of standing on the shoulders of giants, in Newton’s famous phrase. Great breakthroughs are closer to what happens in a flood plain: a dozen separate tributaries converge, and the rising waters lift the genius high enough
committee offer a brilliant case study in how dominant intellectual paradigms can make it more difficult for the truth to be established, even if the people involved are smart and attentive and methodical
the language of modern epidemiology, an index case, an original cholera victim whose evacuations had somehow found their way into the Broad Street well.
crumble immediately after the Broad Street outbreak, though its days were numbered. Eventually, Snow’s and Whitehead’s
pumps in the image, the map took on a new clarity. Cholera wasn’t lingering over the neighborhood in a diffuse form. It was radiating out from a single point.
credentials for solving the mystery
behind London’s most devastating outbreak of disease were his open and probing mind and his intimate knowledge of the community.
built to house the massive low-elevation interception lines that ran parallel to the Thames. Beneath the feet of those happy riverside pedestrians enjoying the view and the open air, beneath the cars hurtling along north of the river, there lies a crucial, hidden boundary, the last line of defense that keeps the
