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

by Steven Johnson

This social topography would play a pivotal role in the events that unfolded in the late summer of 1854, when a terrible scourge struck Soho but left the surrounding neighborhoods utterly unharmed. That selective attack appeared to confirm every elitist cliché in the book: the plague attacking the debauched and the destitute, while passing over the better sort that lived only blocks away. Of course the plague had devastated the “meaner houses” and “bad streets” anyone who had visited those squalid blocks would have seen it coming. Poverty and depravity and low breeding created an environment where disease prospered, as anyone of good social standing would tell you. That’s why they’d built barricades in the first place.