The Ghost Map

Steven Johnson published The Ghost Map in 2006. It is a piece of narrative history about the worst outbreak of cholera in Victorian London and about what came out of the attempt to understand it.

The epidemic struck in the summer of 1854, at a moment when London was becoming a modern city: more than two million people were packed into a circle ten miles across, the place was a centre of travel and trade, and its infrastructure could not keep up with the number of people using it, so an outbreak of disease could run through a whole district in days.

At the middle of the book is the physician John Snow, whose work on the outbreak changed the way people thought about how disease spreads, and whose conclusions had to be argued for against the prevailing theories of the day. Johnson uses the episode to write about epidemic disease, about cities and public health, and about the nature of scientific inquiry, and it is one of the books for which he is best known.