02/07

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06
Feb 14

The Ghost Map: ch.1-4

Renee Esses

It’s hard to believe that people used to live in such horrid conditions. It’s even harder to comprehend the fact that thousands of other wise healthy people could fall ill in such a short period of time. Imagine living in a society where it is very common for entire families to be wiped out in a matter of days. Although we have come a long way since Victorian London (knowledge of medicine, surgical procedures, sanitary conditions), some things haven’t changed enough. There is still a huge difference between social classes. People are still racist, biased, judgmental, superstitious and just plain ignorant about many important matters.
One refreshing person to read about in this book is John Snow. His open-mindedness and intelligent observations are a truly unique quality at such a time period. His self-confidence and assurance that his theory that contaminated water was causing the cholera outbreak enabled him to walk right in the midst of the neighborhood where thousands were dying, in order to further observe. It takes a strong-minded person to think differently than everyone else and stick to his/her convictions.

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06
Feb 14

Dramatic Irony Anxiety

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

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06
Feb 14

What’s most fatal in a society?

(by Cameron M-W)

The cholera outbreak described in The Ghost Map, in addition to more recent and ongoing health crises like HIV/AIDS, illustrates the role of hierarchical power structures in determining the large-scale path of disease. People at the bottom of a social structure are at the highest risk of contracting disease, developing health problems, and dying prematurely because social status determines who gets priority in prevention and treatment efforts (or if any prevention or treatment efforts even occur).

In this instance, the tenants of the Broad Street/Golden Square neighborhood were marginalized due to their low class status. Accordingly, their living conditions (i.e. overflowing cesspools) led to a cholera outbreak because the safety and comfort of this population were not priorities for people who held the power to affect them. The cholera outbreak wasn’t even reported in newspapers for four days. I see parallels to the beginning of the HIV/AIDS crisis that we discussed in class last week: though there could not have been any prevention efforts for a disease no one knew existed at the time, the first cases of “junkie pneumonia” went unreported because of injection drug users’ low social status and the related lack of concern about their deaths.

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