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

by Steven Johnson

Herein lies the dominant irony of the state of British public health in the late 1840s. Just as Snow was concocting his theory of cholera as a waterborne agent that had to be ingested to do harm, Chadwick was building an elaborate scheme that would deliver the cholera bacteria directly to the mouths of Londoners. (A modern bioterrorist couldn’t have come up with a more ingenious and far-reaching scheme.) Sure enough, the cholera returned with a vengeance in 1848–1849, the rising death toll neatly following the Sewer Commission’s cheerful data on the growing supply of waste deposited in the river. By the end of the outbreak, nearly 15,000 Londoners would be dead. The first defining act of a modern, centralized public-health authority was to poison an entire urban population.