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

by Steven Johnson

detail. He was also unusually tolerant of maverick ideas, and immune to the bromides of popular opinion.

What a great eulogy

This is one of the ways that disease, and particularly epidemic disease, plays havoc with traditional histories. Most world-historic events—great military battles, political revolutions—are self-consciously historic to the participants living through them. They act knowing that their decisions will be chronicled and dissected for decades or centuries to come. But epidemics create a kind of history from below: they can be world-changing, but the participants are almost inevitably ordinary folk, following their established routines, not thinking for a second about how their actions will be recorded for posterity. And of course, if they do recognize that they are living through a historical crisis, it’s often too late—because, like it or not, the primary way that ordinary people create this distinct genre of history is by dying.

In a low-transmission environment, lethal strains die out, and mild ones come to dominate the population.

York. Imagine the terror and panic if a biological attack killed four thousand otherwise healthy New Yorkers over a twenty-day period.

We don't have to imagine.

Otherwise, it is hard to imagine how Londoners survived such dangerous times without being paralyzed by terror. (Not all escaped the anxiety, however; witness the prevalence of hysterics in so much Victorian fiction. The corset may not have been the only culprit behind all those fainting spells.)

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.

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.

When Snow and Whitehead took their local knowledge of the Soho community and transformed it into a bird’s eye view of the outbreak, they were helping to invent a way of thinking about urban space whose possibilities we are still exploring today.

Indeed, it is the peculiar nature of epidemic disease to create terrible urban carnage and leave almost no trace in the infrastructure of the city. The other great catastrophes that afflict cities—fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, bombs—almost invariably inflict vast architectural damage alongside the human body count. In fact, that’s how they tend to do their killing: by destroying human shelter.

but what if the technology of genomic science were used to “weaponize” a virus? Genetic engineering may ultimately win out over evolution, but isn’t it a different matter if the viruses are themselves the product of genetic engineering? Wouldn’t the ominous trends of asymmetric warfare—increasingly advanced technology in the hands of smaller and smaller groups—be even more ominous where biological weapons are concerned? If suicide bombers with homemade explosives can effectively hold the American military hostage, imagine what they could do with a weaponized virus.

It’s entirely likely, of course, that we will see the release of an infectious agent engineered in a rogue lab somewhere, and it’s at least conceivable that the attack could unleash a pandemic that could kill thousands or millions—particularly if such an attack took place in the next decade or so, before our defensive tools have matured.