The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World

by Steven Johnson

We’re naturally inclined to consider these scavengers tragic figures, and to fulminate against a system that allowed so many thousands to eke out a living by foraging through human waste.

without any central planner coordinating their actions, without any education at all, this itinerant underclass managed to conjure up an entire system for processing and sorting the waste generated by two million people.

“The removal of the refuse of a large town,” he wrote, “is, perhaps, one of the most important of social operations.” And the scavengers of Victorian London weren’t just getting rid of that refuse—they were recycling it.

If some rogue virus wiped out every single mammal on the planet, life on earth would proceed, largely unaffected by the loss. But if the bacteria disappeared overnight, all life on the planet would be extinguished within a matter of years.

But in that late summer of 1854, as the toshers and the mud-larks and the bone collectors made their rounds, London was headed toward another, even more terrifying, battle between microbe and man. By the time it was over, it would prove as deadly as any in the city’s history.

No one died of stench in Victorian London. But tens of thousands died because the fear of stench blinded them to the true perils of the city, and drove them to implement a series of wrongheaded reforms that only made the crisis worse.

The history of knowledge conventionally focuses on breakthrough ideas and conceptual leaps. But the blind spots on the map, the dark continents of error and prejudice, carry their own mystery as well. How could so many intelligent people be so grievously wrong for such an extended period of time? How could they ignore so much overwhelming evidence that contradicted their most basic theories? These questions, too, deserve their own discipline—the sociology of error.

In a sense, the Industrial Revolution would have never happened if two distinct forms of energy had not been separated from the earth: coal and commoners.

Brewed tea possesses several crucial antibacterial properties that help ward off waterborne diseases: the tannic acid released in the steeping process kills off those bacteria that haven’t already perished during the boiling of the water. The explosion of tea drinking in the late 1700s was, from the bacteria’s point of view, a microbial holocaust.

The clash of microbe and man that played out on Broad Street for ten days in 1854 was itself partly a consequence of each of these trends, though the chains of cause and effect played out on different scales of experience,

both temporal and spatial.

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.

The first defining act of a modern, centralized public-health authority was to poison an entire urban population.

Whenever smart people cling to an outlandishly incorrect idea despite substantial evidence to the contrary, something interesting is at work.

There may be no clearer example of miasma’s dark irony: on the very day that the outbreak in Golden Square was beginning, one of London’s most prestigious papers was urging the Board of Health to accelerate its work poisoning the water supply.

This is how great intellectual breakthroughs usually happen in practice. It is rarely the isolated genius having a eureka moment alone in the lab. 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 that he or she can see around the conceptual obstructions of the age.

The Reverend Whitehead had actively set out to disprove the theory, but he had been so thoroughly convinced by Snow’s argument that he ended up supplying the evidence that ultimately closed the case. The prosecutor had turned out to be the defense’s star witness.

And so the miasma theory did not crumble immediately after the Broad Street outbreak, though its days were numbered. Eventually, Snow’s and Whitehead’s parallel investigations would be seen as the turning point in the battle against cholera. But it would take yet another outbreak—more than a decade later—for that narrative to take hold for good.

On Broad Street itself, only one business has remained constant over the century and a half that separates us from those terrible days in September 1854. You can still buy a pint of beer at the pub on the corner of Cambridge Street, not fifteen steps from the site of the pump that once nearly destroyed the neighborhood. Only the name of the pub has changed. It is now called The John Snow.

However profound the threats are that confront us today, they are solvable, if we acknowledge the underlying problem, if we listen to science and not superstition, if we keep a channel open for dissenting voices that might actually have real answers. The global challenges that we face are not necessarily an apocalyptic crisis of capitalism or mankind’s hubris finally clashing with the balanced spirit of Gaia. We have confronted equally appalling crises before. The only question is whether we can steer around these crises without killing ten million people, or more. So let’s get on with it.