Cholera and How It Changed the World

Where does change come from? When I think about change, I tend to picture social activist groups or something like that, but when I read The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson, I realized that change can be instigated by a much more elusive force: disease.

In London England 1854, a baby girl, just born to the Lewis family, died of cholera in a flat on Broad Street. Soon the entire neighborhood was ravaged by the disease which killed thousands of people by the time it ran its course.

Victorian England was not known for being medically advanced. Medical science at the time was practically the same as it was in the Middle Ages. Most people believed that all sickness was caused by "miasmas," or bad air. To quote Edwin Chadwick, a prominent political figure at the time, "All smell is disease."

John Snow, an anesthesiologist working in London at the time, was not convinced by the whole "all smell is disease" idea. He decided to investigate the cause of cholera himself.

After much strenuous snooping, John Snow was convinced that cholera was a water-borne disease. He, with help from local parishioner Henry Whitehead, traced the epidemic back to the Broad Street water pump. The water from this pump was contaminated by the cesspool the Lewis family had dumped the excrement of their sick baby daughter into. Almost everyone who drank from the Broad Street pump died of cholera.

This cholera epidemic was the beginning of a new age. Medical science advanced as people moved away from the old idea of disease and on to the new idea of disease-causing microbes. John Snow and Henry Whitehead created a disease map to show cholera's path of destruction. This map changed epidemiology, and it got people to start looking at the bigger patterns of a disease. The same type of maps are still used today. Cholera also changed waste management systems. People in London no longer piled up their excrement in house-size heaps that were shoveled right into the Thames. Complex sewer systems were built. Now safe sewer systems are a must for developed areas of the world.

This book was a fun read and the pages just flew by. I recommend it to all science and history nerds out there!