The Ghost Map

Author Steven Johnson takes us on a spellbinding 10-minute tour of The Ghost Map, a disease-thriller telling the story of a cholera outbreak in 1854 Victorian London. The outbreak itself was arguably the deadliest in London's history -- it literally decimated the western side of Soho, killing more than ten percent of the population there in a matter of eight days -- but it is most famous for the map that the physician and epidemiologist John Snow made of the outbreak, a map that eventually helped convince the world that cholera was in fact a waterborne illness, and not transmitted via the air as the then-dominant miasma theory maintained. See also, Hot Zone-The Great Spanish Flu Panedimc of 1918. Posted by Casey Kazan.

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