Infants slowly expiring in their cribs, surrounded by siblings and parents already dead of the disease, who could no longer care for them but whose corpses had not yet been collected by a city task force overwhelmed with the death toll; adults in rude good health, dying within hours of showing symptoms (“rice water” stool being the telltale sign of the final stages); a gravedigger “up to [his] knees in human flesh”, jumping up and down on bodies to compact them in mass graves ill-suited for a population density in the hardest-hit districts of 432 people per acre (by comparison, present-day Manhattan only averages 100 per acre).
Steven Johnson has crafted a fascinating detective story of epidemiological pursuit in The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic — and How It Changed Science, Cities, and The Modern World. And were it not for two lone wolves against the establishment press and government — one a physician, the other a parish priest — the disease might have continued its deadly rampage unchecked through the rest of 19th-century Europe.
L-R: The Rev. Henry Whitehead, Dr. John Snow – partners in an unlikely alliance to overcome official intransigence and popular superstition about the origins of Vibrio cholerae
Also at war against the most at-risk segment of Londoners (the urban poor crammed 20-to-a-room in slums where indoor plumbing was still a pipedream) were two competing ideologies about how cholera was spread: “miasmatists”, who wrongly believed the infection was airborne and must be inhaled, vs. the “contagionists”, convinced the virus was waterborne and had to be ingested. Unfortunately for 10’s of 1000’s of V. cholerae’s victims, the former camp included municipal officials and the press, that together fought — via bureaucratic indifference and vitriolic editorial — the research of Snow and Whitehead, until the weight of their evidence finally overwhelmed the naysayers and shifted public policy.
In their own way like two 20th-century computer geeks innovating the next generation of information technology in a garage apartment, Snow and Whitehead merged a mountain of official recordkeeping with their own sleuthing, pavement-pounding and home lab tests into an ultimately proven theory that the devastation radiated from a single water pump that was the primary source of drinking water for the worst-hit subdistricts. The heroic pair — unconsciously at first — created through their “ghost map” a new way of looking at bland statistics visually to discern patterns of infection and mortality that ultimately led to a revolution in how human waste is disposed of. Johnson’s entertaining and enlightening book is thus also about how modern societies, to put it bluntly, figured what to do with all that crap.
The author has a gift for aphorisms that springs up again and again:
- “The disease was both invisible and everywhere: seeping out of gulley holes, looming in the yellowed fog along the Thames”
- “Conventional flu vaccines are effective against only the type A and B strains of influenza — the kind that sidelines you for a week with a fever and a stuffy head…”
- “We are now, as a species, dependent on dense urban living as a survival strategy.”
- “The microbes don’t care about buildings, because the buildings don’t help them reproduce. So the buildings get to continue standing. It’s the bodies that fall.”
- “[Whitehead’s] religious values had brought him into close contact with the working poor of Soho, but they had not blinded him to the enlightenments of science.”
- About the Board of Health Committee’s initial rejection of Snow’s findings: “They were not hacks, working surreptitiously for Victorian special-interest groups. They were not blinded by politics or personal ambition. They were blinded, instead, by an idea.”
Still, Johnson is not immune from certain shibboleths such as human-caused global warming (which he accepts at face value) or salvation through bureaucracy:
“The complexity of our understanding of microbial diseases is already advancing much faster than the complexity of microbes themselves.”
Compare the bullish optimism of that assertion with the Keystone Kops reaction of federal, state and local governments to the current Covid-19 “crisis”. He’s a much better historian than he is prophet of our deliverance from contagion by the Civil Service.
God help us in 2020 and beyond.
