Bestseller; The Ghost Map

I remember book reports. We all dreaded them. The teacher would sweep her gaze across the room and you would immediately need to tie your shoelaces. Having to give one at the time felt like a worse alternative to detention because you'd be on stage, in front of all your snickering classmates. Worse, you had to follow some arcane who, what, where, why format the teacher had devised which was truly to be feared because you hated the book and skimmed it to get the five main points or whatever they were, covered.

Not to worry, this one will be disorganized and scattered. You may finish up not even knowing what the book is about. My revenge on high school English.

I enjoy history and non-fiction and especially the type that blends them with fiction. A novelist takes a few liberties with the gaps between known things and weaves a captivating story. For me, this genre is more attractive than fiction because nobody had to make it up, it really happened. Like they say, truth really is more facinating than fiction. And sometimes stranger, too.

The Ghost Map is about the cholera epidemic that swept the Soho district of London in September of 1854. Johnson describes slum life with vivid details of daily life such as an entire class of people who acted as a very effective recycling organism for the polluted city: toshers who combed the banks of the Thames for rags and scraps of wood; the night-soil men who cleaned out cesspools; the pure collectors who gathered animal dung; the bone-pickers who collected all manner of them. Mud larks were young toshers, often the tosher's children, and to better find the flotsam at low tide they would hold lanterns under their upheld cloaks making them seem like floating ghosts on the mudflats of the river. Details like that.

Each of these was very specialized and many spent their entire lives in the trade. And it was a trade; each recovered item was resold; the rags went to rag collectors who turned them into paper and felt; the sewage went in barrels on carts to farmers outside the city as fertilizer; the bones went to rendering plants where they were boiled down to make glue and other products; animal dung went to the tanners who had soaked hides in lime to get rid of the hair and the manure neutralized the solution so the hides could be worked into leather.

The author points out that there were not industrial districts then, all these noxious practices were side by side with tenements, shops, and restaurants which gave the slum areas legendary smells. But grim as this was it allowed the city to function. Without these people London would have drowned in its own waste. And that becomes the central theme of the story.

Johnson tells it from the perspective of an epidemiologist; someone who traces the spread of disease. He recounts how two residents of the Golden Square area in the Soho, John Snow and Reverend Whitehead, independently ran down where the cholera came from. In the process Johnson depicts the struggle they endured trying to disprove majority opinion which held that "miasma" or foul odors transmitted disease. Not airborne contagion as we now think of it but if there is stench, the air is full of disease. The toshers and night-soil men became one of rebuttals for the miasmists in fact because they rarely caught cholera despite spending their lives breathing foul air.

Water for city dwellers came from shallow wells which were scattered about the city. Homes in that era did not have plumbed water and waste was either tossed into the street or collected in horrid pits in the basement of many tenements called cesspools. The entire epidemic came from a well pump on Broad Street which had been contaminated by a cracked cesspool just under three feet away.

(Background note; city health officials finally installed sewers after recognizing what evil cesspools posed. These dumped directly into the Thames, doubling the pollution even further when water closets were invented and distributed. Since many water companies pumped drinking water from the river this just made the threat of contagion worse. Johnson notes how similar this was to the bright idea officials in the 1500's had to stop the plague; they thought dogs and cats carried it so all the animals in the entire city were ordered destroyed. They of course were the main predators of rats which carried the disease in their fleas.)

Proving the microbe was waterborne was the task and Snow finally persuaded the officials to remove the Broad Street pump handle thus ending the crisis. It is as much a story of overcoming public opinion as it is remarkable medical sleuthing and if you visit London today you can find the John Snow Pub just a few yards away from the site of the pump on (now) Broadwick Street in Golden Square.

There, you see what happens when you don't follow the book report format? If I hadn't run out of coffee you could have read the book itself by now.