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

by Steven Johnson

one organism captures a certain amount of energy, but in processing that energy, it generates waste. In an efficient system, that waste becomes a new source of energy for another creature in the chain. (That efficiency is one of the reasons why clearing the rain forests is such a shortsighted move: the nutrient cycles in their ecosystems are so tight that the soil is usually very poor for farming: all the available energy has been captured on its way down to the forest floor.)

and carcasses eons ago, and the life-sustaining envelope of the earth’s atmosphere would be closer to the uninhabitable, acidic surface of Venus. 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.

“I found whole areas of the cellars of both houses were full of nightsoil to the depth of three feet, which had been permitted for years to accumulate from the overflow of the cesspools…. Upon passing through the passage of the first house I found the yard covered in nightsoil, from the overflowing of the privy to the depth of nearly six inches and bricks were placed to enable the inmates to get across dryshod.”

Ew. Where is this in Regency romance?

smell it emitted was not a public-health risk. 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.

Dickens and Engels were not alone; practically the entire medical and political establishment fell into the same deadly error: everyone from Florence Nightingale to the pioneering reformer Edwin Chadwick to the editors of The Lancet to Queen Victoria herself.

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 qu...

this is basically the true story in the story here... not all the extra 100 pages at the end where he tries to 'update' it for modern-day relevance.

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. Yet something has been lost in the record as well, something more intimate

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. Remember, too, that the diet and sanitary conditions of the day—no refrigeration; impure water supplies; excessive consumption of beer, spirits, and coffee—created a breeding ground for digestive ailments, even when they didn’t lead to cholera. Imagine living with that sword of Damocles hovering above your head—every stomach pain or watery stool a potential harbinger of imminent doom. City dwellers had lived with fear before, and London, of

In this sense, what the Vibrio cholerae bacterium desires, more than anything, is an environment in which human beings have a regular habit of eating other people’s excrement. V. cholerae cannot be transmitted through the air or even through the exchange of most bodily fluids. The ultimate route of transmission is almost invariably the same: an infected person emits the bacteria during one of the violent bouts of diarrhea that are the disease’s trademark, and another person somehow ingests some of the bacteria, usually through drinking contaminated water.

For most of the history of Homo sapiens, this dependence on excrement eating meant that the cholera bacterium didn’t travel well. Since the dawn of civilization, human culture has demonstrated a remarkable knack for diversity, but eating other humans’ waste is as close to a universal taboo as any in the book. And so, without a widespread practice of consuming other people’s waste, cholera stayed close to its original home in the brackish waters of the Ganges delta, surviving on a diet of plankton.

This feels like the time for a poop joke

Inevitably, in these sprawling new metropolitan spaces, with their global networks of commerce, lines were crossed: drinking water became laced with sewage. Ingesting small particles of human waste went from being an anomaly to a staple of everyday life. This was good news for V. cholerae.

Despite all the technological advances of the Industrial Age, Victorian medicine was hardly a triumph of the scientific method.

understatement

a family dying together, slowly, agonizingly, with full awareness of their fate—that is a supremely dark chapter in the book of death. That it continues on as a regular occurrence in certain parts of the world today should be a scandal to us all.

in projecting back to the mind-set of a Londoner in 1854, we have to remember this crucial reality: that a sort of existential doubt lingered over the city, a suspicion not that London was flawed, but that the very idea of building cities on the scale of London was a mistake, one that was soon to be corrected.

The chronic drinking problem in Native American populations has been blamed on everything from the weak “Indian constitution” to the humiliating abuses of the U.S. reservation system. But their alcohol intolerance mostly likely has another explanation: their ancestors didn’t live in towns.

One provides the fizz, the other the buzz. And so in battling the health crisis posed by faulty waste-recycling in human settlements, the proto-farmers unknowingly stumbled across the strategy of consuming the microscopic waste products generated by the fermenters. They drank the waste discharged by yeasts so that they could drink their own waste without dying in mass numbers.

Huh!

Most of us today accept that the broad movements of Chadwick’s campaigns were ultimately positive ones. 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.

The extent of London’s excrement problem was universally agreed upon. Chadwick’s

Can we agree this is just a funny sentence?

Whenever smart people cling to an outlandishly incorrect idea despite substantial evidence to the contrary, something interesting is at work. In the case of miasma, that something involves a convergence of multiple forces, all coming together to prop up a theory that should have died out decades before. Some of those forces were ideological in nature, matters of social prejudice and convention.

Cities are a force for environmental health as well. This may be the most surprising new credo of green politics, which has in the past largely associated itself with a back-to-nature ethos that was explicitly antiurban in its values. Dense urban environments may do away with nature altogether—there are many vibrantly healthy neighborhoods in Paris or Manhattan that lack even a single tree—but they also perform the crucial service of reducing mankind’s environmental footprint. Compare the sewage system of a midsized city like Portland, Oregon, with the kind of waste management resources that would be required to support the same population dispersed across the countryside. Portland’s 500,000 inhabitants require two sewage treatment plants, connected by 2,000 miles of pipes. A rural population would require more than 100,000 septic tanks, and 7,000 miles of pipe.

Shout out!

And this bad news is likely to arrive courtesy of a walk-on part on the world-historical stage, somebody driving a rigged SUV into Soho and pulling the trigger. There are 20,000 nuclear weapons in the world capable of inflicting this level of damage. That we know about.

Pause for dramatic effect