As I read the first three chapters of The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson, I was pleased with Johnson’s narrative, but disappointed to see how the novel did not relate to the “modern world.” That being said, it was only the first three chapters so it is too early to go into the implications of what Dr. John Snow accomplished. I am amazed at how Johnson was able to convey the cholera outbreak in an engaging narrative. He also touched upon the social class and the society of 1854 London through his use of anecdotes. Specifically, in pages 36-39, he explains the effects of cholera in laypeople’s terms. Instead of giving data, Johnson would merely use anecdotes get his point across. He brought up the topic of disinformation where the London Times would have advertisements for the “cures” for chorea from fraudsters.
Something that I wondered as I read this was how strangely it felt reading someone’s documentation of a disease outbreak from the 19th century in the 21st century. It is akin to reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in the present day. If The Ghost Map were written in the late 19th century, it would be a very powerful narrative that speaks about the importance of clean water, similar to Carson’s message about how reliance on pesticides is a bad thing, but without the backlash from Silent Spring. The actions of Dr. Snow and how he would record the households that had cholera and the sampling of the water pumps from different locations can be compared to Carson’s findings about the hazards of DDT and other chemicals. The part that makes this awkward was that these events took place a while ago and because the reader is looking at the events in hindsight, it can make the readers wonder why such simple truths were so hard to find out. A few people in this class expressed disbelief that it was so hard to figure out the cure to cholera was clean water and I think it is because we are reading this in hindsight and with that, I will end on this note: Do you think reading about something new to us such as the discovery and invention of smartphones and cloud storage right now would be as interesting to our future generations a few hundred years from now where such technology will probably be extremely taken for granted or obsolete as it is to us?
You’re speaking of smartphones and cloud storage, but let’s take some steps back, back to when cellular devices weren’t even invented yet. It has taken over the course of decades to have the new technology we know about now. When we look back to what we consider the old or obsolete technology, I’m sure we find ourselves thinking why people especially in the latter half of the 20th century were not able to come up with something as efficient, resourceful and high-tech. Just like in this case, the miasma theory served as the most common and rational explanation for epidemics for a while until the germ theory came about, when it gradually put the miasma theory out of use and just something to remind ourselves what a long way we have come in the field of public health and epidemiology. Everything starts off with a foundation, and from that foundation, we build upon it to improve that base and make it applicable to various changes in our society and environment.