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

by Steven Johnson

Every few months, an unusually dense pocket of methane gas would be ignited by one of their kerosene lamps and the hapless soul would be incinerated twenty feet below ground, in a river of raw sewage.

What a way to go

One privately run burial ground in Islington had packed 80,000 corpses into an area designed to hold roughly three thousand.

O__o

The cats’-meat man, the fish salesman, the butcher, the fruiterer, the toy-seller, the old rag-and-bone men, jostle and cry their wares.

One of these is not like the other

Without proper barns, residents converted traditional dwellings into “cow houses”—herding twenty-five or thirty cows into a single room.

Ok but how big is this room

One man who lived on the upper floor at 38 Silver Street kept twenty-seven dogs in a single room.

Gtfoh

Imagine if every time you experienced a slight upset stomach you knew that there was an entirely reasonable chance you’d be dead in forty-eight hours.

Bruh lol I’d be so dead

Drop it into a setting where excrement eating is a common practice, and cholera will thrive—hijacking intestine after intestine to manufacture more bacteria.

Aaaaah yes excrement eating

indeed, one British doctor, Thomas Latta, hit upon this precise cure in 1832, months after the first outbreak, injecting salty water into the veins of the victims.

Wait that wouldn’t kill the patient???

we have here a chief law enforcement official writing into the daily paper essentially to encourage people to ingest heroin to treat their upset stomachs—and if the readers don’t believe him, they should head down to the nearby squad house to hear firsthand how highly regarded the “medicine” is by the police force.

Nice

Procedures that would now take hours to complete were executed in three minutes or less, to minimize the agony. One surgeon boasted that he could “amputate a shoulder in the time it took to take a pinch of snuff.”

Yikes

You have to be a committed libertarian or anarchist to think that the government shouldn’t be building sewers or funding the Centers for Disease Control or monitoring the public water supply.

El oh el

For the first time, the law had something to say about people opting to fill their old cellars with “great heaps of turds,” as Samuel Pepys put it in a 1660 journal entry.

I really gotta read his diary bc every time he’s quoted I bust out laughing

the CDC publish a weekly update on the current state of influenza in the United States, along with a near-endless array of charts and maps documenting the different strains of flu circulating through the national bloodstream.

DO THEY STILL

A store selling nothing but buttons most likely won’t be able to find a market in a town of 50,000 people, but in New York City, there’s an entire button-store district.

Wait fr?