Steven Johnson’s book, The
Ghost Map, is a thoroughly researched, very interesting, and well
written historical detective story. It
describes how Dr. John Snow proved that cholera was a waterborne disease,
during an 1854 epidemic in London. In
those days, nobody knew that tiny invisible life forms, in a nice cool glass of
water, could pull the curtains on your existence in a most unpleasant way.
At the time, London was suffering from a population
explosion, soaring from one million in 1800, to 2.4 million in 1851 (5 million
in 1900, now 14 million). Its
infrastructure was totally inadequate for the huge mob. “It was a kind of permanent, rolling
disaster, a vast organism destroying itself by laying waste to its habitat.” One question tormented the minds of urban
bureaucrats: “What are we going to do with all this shit?” London had become the biggest city in the
world, and the biggest city in human history.
To cholera bacteria, heaven looks like dense crowds of people who are
unclever at sanitation. Joy!
The domestication of grain in the Fertile Crescent was a
half-clever blooper that enabled humans to exist in densities that were
unnatural, unhealthy, and crazy-making. Cholera
apparently emerged in Asia in about 500 B.C.
Much later, in the age of steamships and locomotives, both people and
pathogens could travel great distances at speeds never before possible. Cholera arrived in Europe in 1829, advanced
to Britain in 1831, and then sailed across the Atlantic to Montreal in
1832. Boats and trains rapidly spread it
across Canada and the U.S. In the past
two centuries, seven pandemics have spread cholera around the world. The seventh began in 1961, and is still
killing today.
In the old days, filthy cities were population sinks — the
death rate exceeded the birth rate. Child
mortality was very high. An analysis of
1842 data found that 62 percent of recorded deaths were children under 5. The upper class life expectancy was 45, and
for commoners it was their mid-20s.
Another source noted that in 1750, the population increase in all of
England was cancelled by the high mortality of London. Urban population levels were maintained by a
steady inflow of rural peasants who had been forced off the common lands to
make room for sheep, and refugees from the famine in Ireland.
Johnson described 1850s London as a city that wasted
little. Thousands of underclass
scavengers did a remarkable job of recycling.
They included “bone pickers, rag gatherers, pure finders, dredgermen,
mud larks, sewer hunters, dustmen, night soil men, bunters, toshers, shoremen.” Pure finders gathered dog turds (“pure”) and sold
them to tanneries.
Londoners got their water from shallow wells in their neighborhoods. Sewage and other wastes were stored in
cesspools. When your cesspool was full,
the night soil men hauled the dreck out to farms, where it was applied to
fields. As the city expanded, the
distance to farms increased, as did the cost of removal. So, more and more stinky muck remained in
town. Dung heaps grew to the size of
large houses. The entire city had a
powerfully intoxicating aroma. Parliament
had to shut down during a heat wave 1858, when the flowing sewer known as the
Thames River emitted the Great Stink.
The center stage of Johnson’s book was a well pump at 40
Broad Street, in the Soho district. Near
the end of August 1854, the six month old daughter of the Lewis family got sick
and died. Her soiled diapers went into
the cesspool, and caused the biggest cholera outbreak in London history. The cesspool was only accessible to the Lewis
family. Other tenants in the building “tossed
their waste out the windows into the squalid courtyard at the back of the house.” The cesspool was in the cellar, and the
brick-lined well was just 32 inches (81 cm) away. Oh-oh!
A thousand people used the pump. Ironically, the water was clearer than water
from other pumps in the neighborhood, and many preferred it. In less than two weeks, 700 nearby people
were dead. Cholera symptoms included an
upset stomach and rocket diarrhea. When
this happened, you might turn blue and be dead within 48 hours. To become infected, you had to ingest more
than a million bacteria, via contaminated water. Stomach acid killed almost all of them. If survivors entered your intestines, you
might soon be joining your neighbors for a ride in the dead cart.
With the exception of Dr. Snow, all the experts agreed that
the cause of cholera was miasma — stinky air.
Poor Dr. Snow was cursed with an ability to engage in critical
thinking. If the entire city smelled
like shit, why did cholera only occur in isolated clusters? Why did the sewer hunters, who spent their
days wading in filthy muck looking for lost valuables, not die like flies?
Much of the book is a tragi-comical soap opera about the
astonishing stupidity of experts. Since
miasma was certainly the cause of the problem, the solution was to move the
stink elsewhere. So, in the name of
public health, they built sewer systems, and directed the smelly crud into
river. Before long, “the Thames had been
transformed from a fishing ground teeming with salmon to one of the most
polluted waterways in the world.” Meanwhile,
the epidemics continued.
In this era, private water companies were also growing, in
response to the trendy flush toilet fad (flushes filled cesspools even
faster). There was no unified city
plan. So, it was not uncommon for water
company intake pipes to be a bit downstream from sewer system discharge
pipes. Guess what happened.
Anyway, after much study, Dr. Snow concluded that the water
from the Broad Street pump was somehow killing people. The experts howled, shrieked, and called him
a bloody nutjob. He drew a map showing
the location of the neighborhood pumps, and added a black mark for each cholera
death, at the location of their residence — the “ghost map.” Yikes!
Luckily, Snow convinced a respected pastor in the neighborhood, and they
managed to get permission to remove the pump handle. The deaths soon tapered off.
Meanwhile, Mr. Lewis, the father of the dead baby, also
died. Mrs. Lewis dumped his filth in the
cesspool in the cellar. If the handle
had not been removed, the epidemic would have raged on. The accuracy of Snow’s theory was supported
by obvious smoking gun evidence and numerous eyewitnesses. Yet, even after he made this revolutionary
discovery, and curtailed the epidemic, the experts continued to ridicule him. His achievement wasn’t honored until years
after his death.
As I write, many in America’s ruling class refuse to believe
that human activities are accelerating climate change. Many consider them to be shameless loudmouth
liars, because it’s impossible for anyone to actually be so stupid. Really?
I enjoyed the book until the Epilogue, when it hit a patch of
banana peels. Johnson, a proud resident
of the utopia of Brooklyn, praises the excellent cities in developed countries. Birth rates are low, life expectancies are
high, incomes are huge, health care is great, the technology is state of the
art, well-educated residents are very cool people, the food and entertainment
are amazing, and the environmental footprint is much smaller than in the suburbs. Eventually, everyone will live in wonderful
cities, and enjoy excellent lives. Hooray!
The tone is mostly upbeat, but he does acknowledge that we
may experience some problems in the coming years — climate change, energy
limits, warfare, influenza pandemics, and so on. Don’t worry!
Things also looked bleak in 1854 — but the experts saved them! The global challenges in 2018 are many orders
of magnitude worse. There are now three megacities with populations
over 30 million. In many regions today, conditions
are fairly similar to 1854, or worse.
Johnson believes that cities will survive the end of
oil. Hmmm… Systems for water distribution, sewage
treatment, trash removal, medical services, agriculture, transportation,
lighting, heating, cooling, law enforcement, communications, manufacturing,
etc., require enormous amounts of energy — primarily fossil energy. Experts who believe in technological miracles,
rational societies, and rapid radical worldwide change, suffer from thought
processes similar to the miasma experts of London. A human herd of seven-plus billion, largely
urban, propelled by human muscles and horse power,
is magical thinking.
Sorry for the ranting.
I really liked most of the book. The
Epilogue made me stop and think (and wince).
Maybe that was the clever plan. Maybe
Johnson is a coyote teacher, using slippery ideas to overwhelm our mental
autopilot, and trick us into putting the whip to our prodigious brains.
Johnson, Steven, The
Ghost Map, Riverhead Books, New York, 2006.
