While reading “The Ghost Map” I could not help but feel a certain sense of anxiety. The cause of the disease, in retrospect, seems fairly obvious yet here we are reading about entire families succumbing to cholera. Here we are reading about a researcher struggling to find the culprit of this disease without knowing that the virus was already discovered. Here we are looking at the elite attempting to blame the poor for the cause of the disease and their living conditions. It was an exact form of dramatic irony and all I wanted to do was yell at people to listen to Dr. John Snow.
The progression of this disease could have been limited if people were not as blinded by the social conditions and general unrest of the time. The book spent a great amount of time describing the poor living conditions of those in the lower class, with feces piling up and causing contamination of the water supply, with the sheer concentration of people in small areas, with the literal physical division between the lower and upper class. They began to blame the air, blame the people, blame the dead, yet no one would be willing to listen to the doctor who figured it out. I’m interested to see the later chapters and to see how the public will shift their attitudes towards the disease.
Medina Mishiyeva
