Book Review: The Ghost Map

“The Ghost Map,” written by Steven Johnson, told a narrative story of the cholera outbreak in London. In the summer of 1854, the patient zero, an infant child of Sarah Lewis, became sick with cholera. In the midst of the panic that Sarah Lewis felt losing her child, she threw the infected waste into a cesspool nearby her home. This is how the cholera outbreak began. Soon there were reports of cholera all over London, and multiple theories of how cholera was contracted were published in newspapers and journals. The most prevalent was the Miasma Theory, the belief that the city’s crowding, along with poor sanitation and hygiene, created a foul smell in the air which, when inhaled, caused the epidemic disease. However, John Snow would be the one to discover that it was not the foul air that caused cholera, though the filthy environment was a strong

I was especially intrigued to learn the full story of John Snow and the cholera epidemic. In a previous Social Psychology course, we read a book on school violence and how to prevent mass shootings from happening, called “Nobody Left to Hate” by Elliot Aronson. In this book, Aronson discussed “pump handle interventions”1 that stopped the issue of school violence on the surface, such as the establishment of metal detectors in school or the ban of guns. He named these interventions after Snow’s work because the removal of the pump handle halted the epidemic1, but it did not remove the real cause of the outbreak: contaminated water. In Aronson’s analogy, the pump handle was to metal detectors as contaminated water was to lack of empathy and emotional intelligence1. In other words, Aronson meant that the removal of the pump handle stopped the epidemic from spreading more on Broad Street, but the real solution would come from removal of contamination in the