He also was living in the Soho neighborhood of London when a particularly virulent outbreak of cholera occurred.Īll the received medical wisdom of the time assumed that the disease was caused by some sort of airborne miasma, encouraged by the overcrowding and pestilent environment of this teeming area. One of the first physicians to understand and use chloroform and ether, he became a physician to Queen Victoria, helping her deliver her innumerable children with far less pain. He was born poor in Northern England and had to get an education by force of intellect and character.

John Snow was a true outsider to Victorian professional medicine. The excitement of the book is how one man understood how to cure this plague and how he used a new way to display information to do so. The book is about something as messy as information, excrement, and how its disposal caused an outbreak of cholera in Victorian London. The Ghost Map shows how information actually works in the world. ISSN 0300-5771.In my days as an Information management consultant, I believed, as did all my colleagues, that if people were just shown correct and feasible information they would act in accordance with it – they would follow where it led. 'The Ghost Map By Steven Johnson - Books - Review'. But for the reader prepared to put the book down at page 217, Steven Johnson has written a comprehensive, diversely sourced and insightful blockbuster account of a cholera outbreak in Victorian London.' Reviews A review posted in the International Journal of Epidemiology was largely favorable, stating that 'the single weakness of this book is a bewildering final section which attempts to apply John Snow's work to a long list of contemporary problems. The New York Times reviewed The Ghost Map, stating that there was 'a great story here'. Around the mid-1850s Snow figured out the source of cholera contamination to be the drinking water from the Broad Street pump. John Snow was a revered anesthetist who carried out epidemiological work in Soho, London. The two central figures are physician John Snow, who created a map of the cholera cases, and the Reverend Henry Whitehead, whose extensive knowledge of the local community helped determine the initial cause of the outbreak.

The work covers the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak. It was released on 19 October 2006 through Riverhead. The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic – and How it Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World is a book by Steven Berlin Johnson in which he describes the most intense outbreak of cholera in Victorian London and centers on John Snow and Henry Whitehead.

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