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

by Steven Johnson

And here lies an antidote of sorts to the horror of Broad Street, to the grisly image of entire families dying together in their single-room flats: the image of Snow and Whitehead building an unlikely friendship in those late winter months of 1855, drawn together by a terrible outbreak of disease in their neighborhood and, ironically, by Whitehead’s initial skepticism about Snow’s theory. We know very little about the personal interaction between the two men, beyond the crucial data they exchanged, beyond Snow’s sharing of his monograph, and his prophetic statements about the future of cholera. But it is clear from Whitehead’s subsequent recollections that a powerful bond formed between them—the quiet, awkward anesthesiologist and the compulsively social curate—a bond forged both by living through an urban battleground of unimaginable terror, but also by jointly unearthing the secret cause behind the carnage. This is not mere sentimentality. The triumph of twentieth-century metropolitan life is, in a real sense, the triumph of one image over the other: the dark ritual of deadly epidemics replaced by the convivial exchanges of strangers from different backgrounds sharing ideas on the sidewalk. When John Snow first stepped up to the Broad Street pump in early September 1854, it was by no means clear which image would be victorious. London seemed to be destroying itself. You could leave town for a weekend and come back to find ten percent of your neighbors being wheeled down ...