The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson
Thursday, 31 Jan 2008 17:06
The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson.
Published by Penguin, out now, paperback, 300 pages, £8.99.
In a nutshell...
Dark, gripping, non-fiction, detective story
What's it all about?
In 1854 a cholera epidemic focused on Soho's Golden Square killed hundreds. Soho at the time was four times as densely populated as Manhattan today and London with 2.4 million people had a waste problem. The rich paid men to clear cess pits of 'night soil', but the poor let it fester in cellars and street.
Amid the dirt and disease local doctor, and anaesthetist to Queen Victoria, John Snow aimed to prove cholera is water-born, against the prevailing paradigm that the disease was spread by air, and so stop further people dying. His solution is scientific detective work with local vicar Henry Whitehead.
Steven Johnson takes the reader through Victorian London's scavenging economy with first hand accounts and a little help from Dickens.
The Ghost Map follows Snow's work to the eponymous map - showing the link between the Broadwick pump and the outbreak - and the infant whose death was the source of the outbreak.
But it also goes beyond Victorian London and shows how Snow's methods and his map are still invaluable today. Cholera after all spread by a wave of imperial globalisation from India to London.
Who's it by?
New Yorker Steven Johnson's previous books have focused on how man, technology and the internet have come together (Everything Bad is Good for You, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software)- so a tale of Victorian London might seem a strange choice.
However he looks at the technology of the time and the prevailing beliefs in much the same way.
As an example...
"By Sunday morning , a strange quiet had over taken the streets of Soho. The usual chaos of the streetsellers had disappeared; most of the neighbourhood's residents had either evacuated or were suffering behind their doors.
"Seventy of them had perished over the preceding 24 hours, hundreds more were at the very edge of death... The most common sight on the streets were the priests and doctors making their frantic rounds."
What the others say
"His book is a formidable gathering of small facts and big ideas, and the narrative portions are particularly strong, informed by real empathy for both his named and his nameless characters." - New York Times
So is it any good?
Johnson's journey into the stench and filth of Victorian London with tales for men drowning in pits of faeces, professional dog s**t collectors (selling their wares to the tanning industry) is just as potent as Patrick Süskind's filthy Paris in Perfume.
The description of the symptoms of cholera - as all the water in your body drains out - will make you grab your stomach and make travelling packed on public transport truly unnerving as you start to feel bacteria pass around commuters. Perhaps it is best saved for the beach.
A simple description of The Ghost Map as academic study of disease and urban development could well be off-putting, but Johnson brings the danger and excitement in Whitehead and Snow's lifesaving work, as well as the minutiae of life in Soho in the 19th century, and the microscopic life of the bacterium behind the outbreak
He also is careful not to rely on hindsight to brush aside the poor science heaped with social prejudiced that stood against the pair. He explains down to the molecules why the belief that smell carried the disease was so strong.
So, is it any good? Yes, excellent, but whether the praise should go the Johnson or Snow and Whitehead is uncertain. Enjoy the book and please remember 2008 is the international year of sanitation.
7.5/10
Daniel Barnes
Steven Johnson talks about The Ghost Map, John Snow and cholera.
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