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

by Steven Johnson

It wasn’t just mankind that was being unified; it was also mankind’s small intestine.

It was the product of human choice, to be sure, but some new form of collective human choice where the collective decisions were at odds with the needs and desires of its individual members.

the uncanny feeling that, somehow, humans themselves were not in control of the urbanization process.

The explosion of tea drinking in the late 1700s was, from the bacteria’s point of view, a microbial holocaust.

The first defining act of a modern, centralized public-health authority was to poison an entire urban population.

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.