The Ghost Map (2006) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

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Characters/People edit see section history

• John Snow: Physician focusing on anesthesia who begins to catalog the cholera deaths in his neighborhood
• Henry Whitehead: Young minister who is trying to understand why his parishioners are dying and how he can prevent further deaths. Was a true "man on the street" in his day and was able to finally provide further evidence that waterborne diseases do exist.
• William Farr: Great with statistics and a person that assisted Dr. Snow in his quest.
• Edwin Chadwick: Add a description of this character.
• Sarah Lewis
• Benjamin Hall
• Bazalgette
• Cooper
• Henry Mayhew
• Susannah Eley
• Richardson

Quotes edit see section history

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• “"Most world-historic events - great military battles, political revolutions - are self-consciously historic to the participants living through them. They act knowing that their decisions will be chronicled and dissected for decades or centuries to come. But epidemics create a kind of history from below: they can be world-changing, but the participants are almost inevitably ordinary folk, following their established routines, not thinking for a second about how their actions will be recorded for posterity. And of course, if they do recognize that they are living through a historical crisis, it's often too late - because, like it or not, the primary way that ordinary people create this distinct genre of history is by dying." (p. 32).”

• “"... Farr began tabulating cholera deaths by elevation, and indeed the numbers seemed to show that higher ground was safer ground. This would prove to be a classic case of correlation being mistaken for causation: the communities at higher elevations tended to be less densely settled than the crowded streets around the Thames, and their distance from the river made them less likely to drink its contaminated water." (pg 101-102).”

• “"...plagues were God's way of adapting the human body to global changes in the atmosphere, killing off thousands or millions, but in the process creating generations that could thrive in the new environment." (pg 127).”

  Henry Whitehead's understanding of plagues

• “"The sense of smell is often described as the most primitive of senses, provoking powerful feelings of lust or repulsion, triggering memoires involontaires... Modern brain-imaging technology has revealed the intimate physiological connection between the olfactory system and the brain's emotional centers... <that> possess the capacity to override the neocortical systems where language-based reasoning occurs." (pg 128).”

• “"Great breakthroughs are closer to what happens in a floodplain: a dozen separate tributaries converge, and the rising waters lift the genius high enough that he or she can see around the conceptual obstructions of the age." (pg 149).”

• “"And so the megacities of the twenty-first century will have to learn all over again the lessons that London muddled through in the nineteenth. They'll be dealing with 20 million people, instead of 2 million, but the scientific and technological wisdom available to them far exceeds what Farr and Chadwick and Bazalgette had at their disposal." (pg 217).”

• Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers

• Whenever smart people cling to an outlandishly incorrect idea despite substantial evidence to the contrary, something interesting is at work.

  Highlighted by 41 Kindle customers

• Psychologists call this type of faulty reasoning “confirmation bias”: the tendency to force new information to fit one’s preconceptions about the world.

  Highlighted by 39 Kindle customers

• This is how great intellectual breakthroughs usually happen in practice. It is rarely the isolated genius having a eureka moment alone in the lab. Nor is it merely a question of building on precedent, of standing on the shoulders of giants, in Newton’s famous phrase. Great breakthroughs are closer to what happens in a flood plain: a dozen separate tributaries converge, and the rising waters lift the genius high enough that he or she can see around the conceptual obstructions of the age.

  Highlighted by 38 Kindle customers

• The history of knowledge conventionally focuses on breakthrough ideas and conceptual leaps. But the blind spots on the map, the dark continents of error and prejudice, carry their own mystery as well. How could so many intelligent people be so grievously wrong for such an extended period of time? How could they ignore so much overwhelming evidence that contradicted their most basic theories? These questions, too, deserve their own discipline—the sociology of error.

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• Chadwick helped solidify, if not outright invent, an ensemble of categories that we now take for granted: that the state should directly engage in protecting the health and well-being of its citizens, particularly the poorest among them; that a centralized bureaucracy of experts can solve societal problems that free markets either exacerbate or ignore; that public-health issues often require massive state investment in infrastructure or prevention.

  Highlighted by 35 Kindle customers

• Snow’s work was constantly building bridges between different disciplines, some of which barely existed as functional sciences in his day, using data on one scale of investigation to make predictions about behavior on other scales.

  Highlighted by 33 Kindle customers

• The first defining act of a modern, centralized public-health authority was to poison an entire urban population.

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• without any central planner coordinating their actions, without any education at all, this itinerant underclass managed to conjure up an entire system for processing and sorting the waste generated by two million people.

  Highlighted by 31 Kindle customers

• Brewed tea possesses several crucial antibacterial properties that help ward off waterborne diseases: the tannic acid released in the steeping process kills off those bacteria that haven’t already perished during the boiling of the water. The explosion of tea drinking in the late 1700s was, from the bacteria’s point of view, a microbial holocaust.

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• In a sense, the Industrial Revolution would have never happened if two distinct forms of energy had not been separated from the earth: coal and commoners.

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Broad Street
• South London
• Soho
• England
• St. Luke
• Lambeth
• Victorian London
• Berwick Street
• East London
• Hampstead
• Poland Street
• New York City
• Golden Square
• Waterstones

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Steven Johnson (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 614.514

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Professional & Technical › Medical › Medicine › Internal Medicine › Infectious Disease › Communicable Diseases
• Books › Professional & Technical › Professional Science › Biological Sciences › Biology › Microbiology
• Books › Medicine › Internal Medicine › Infectious Disease › Communicable Diseases
• Books › Science › Biological Sciences › Biology › Microbiology
• Books › History › Europe › England › London
• Books › Medicine › Special Topics › History
• Books › Science › Technology › History of Technology
• Books › Biographies & Memoirs › Professionals & Academics › Scientists
• Books › History › Europe › Ireland
• Books › History › Historical Study › Social History
• Books › History › World

Links to Supplemental Material edit see section history

• The Ghost Map: Steven Johnson: The website for the book. Contains an animated introduction, video interviews with the author, reviews, discussion guides and more!
• Penguin Reading Guides: Brief introduction to the book and author followed by discussion questions.
• GeoSentinel: Mentioned in the Conclusion: "tracks infectious disease among travellers" Steven Johnson.
• BetterLesson: Sickness, Cities and Science: An interdisciplinary middle/high school unit based on the content of this awesome book!
• Book Review: Maybe it's my inner Brooklynite talking, but to me cities are natural phenomena: Ants make hills, bees make hives, humans make cities. Each of these colonies is a meta-organism, really. They all must survive by taking in resources and then figuring out what to do with the waste that comes out the other end. The most innovative organisms and communities figure out ways to recycle waste into raw material for more housing, new appendages, or further growth. The ability to exploit waste instead of drowning in it comes naturally to ants and bees, but it has proved tricky for us. Modern cities seem to be perpetually teetering at the brink of one crisis or another, be it chemical or microbial in origin. If the pollution doesn't get you, the influenza will. Still, such concerns pale in comparison to the survival challenges that cities used to face.