With Humanities Highlights, Himmelfarb staff aims to spotlight useful books from our Humanities collection. This week, we’re showcasing “The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic – and How it Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World,” by Steven Johnson.
About the Book: A story of epidemiology in its infancy, Steven Johnson analyzes the cholera outbreak in 1854 and the key investigators unraveling the mystery of transmission. Balancing urban planning, biology, and politics, The Ghost Map explores the rise of ultra-dense urban communities and the trial-and-error discovery of basic civic needs, like waste management. It’s a book about ideas: both why we cling to bad ones and the consequences of doing so.
Reasons to Read: If you enjoy medical detective stories, Johnson provides an excellent one, assembling information into an efficient and intelligible chain of cause and effect while commenting insightfully on the history of disease. The book has no shortage of Victorian horrors, as well, if you want to further your gratitude for 21st century life.
Reasons to Avoid: well, it is fundamentally a book about poop (and ingesting it); "what cholera wants is an environment where people are eating other people's excrement” (Johnson, 2006, pg. 40). Scatological tolerances aside, it’s a book as much about urban planning and the competition of ideas as it is a straightforward disease narrative, compared to something like Pale Rider.
Further Reading:
- The Power of Plagues [available in Himmelfarb’s Humanities collection]
- Pale rider : the Spanish Flu of 1918 and how it changed the world [available in Himmelfarb’s Humanities collection]
- Cholera, Chloroform, and the Science of Medicine: a Life of John Snow [Available Online through Himmelfarb]
- Underworld [available through the Consortium Loan Service] - Delillo’s novel of nuclear waste management spanning the 20th century
References
Johnson, S. (2006). The Ghost Map. Penguin.
