If you were to visit London's Broad Street today, you would find the home of poet William Blake, a couple of Chinese restaurants, and a slew of townhomes re-purposed and used as offices. You would also find a replica water pump, an informational plaque, and a pub called the John Snow, all three references to the cholera outbreak of 1854.
In The Ghost Map, Steven Johnson describes the outbreak which was the most serious and virulent to ever have occurred, and he focuses his narrative on the Victorian figures of John Snow and Henry Whitehead. Snow, a physician, was at the frontline of anaesthesia development and also devoted a great deal of his career to the issue of medical hygiene. Because he was able to trace the source of the cholera outbreak, he is considered to be the godfather of modern epidemiology. Whitehead, on the other hand, was a priest who firmly believed in the miasma theory which stated that disease was spread in the air as a sort of pollution but once he realized that Snow's theory was more likely to prove accurate, he set about trying to disprove the miasma theory that he had previously so wholeheartedly endorsed.
Johnson's book covers the entire outbreak and shows how Snow's map of the path of the disease, and Whitehead's knowledge of the local community, came together to trace the source of the cholera outbreak, which turned out to be a water pump at the end of Broad Street.
The book was an immediate, if unpredictable, success ; after all, who would believe that a book about water-borne disease in Victorian London would appeal not just to science geeks and literary critics, but the general public as a whole? Critics put the success down to Johnson's very original style of writing and presentation, and the fact that he wrote for a readership he believed to be unfamiliar with the language of epistimiology, rather than for those already familiar with it and looking to extend the breadth of their knowledge.
Johnson has written nine books manly related to technology, and he has also created three websites and the Webby Award winning online community Plastic.com.
