2014 Shaping the Future of New York Fridays: 11:00-1:45 Boylan Hall, 2231

How many times has the thoughts of the government and the fear ridden people lead to wrong decisions? How many times did the stigma of being poor carry over into a deserved death by plague? Apparently, a lot.
As I was reading the end chapters I was confused as to how many people assumed the poor were poor from choice, were living in filth by choice. Whitehead was a physician and religious man that we even willing to believe that the poor and destitute could have been the deserved receivers of this disease yet his cases said otherwise when the rich and “pristine” died. The environment was conducive to these deaths with their cramped quarters and limited sewage systems but the people were not to blame. In fact, now we recognize that “squatter communities… are where the developing world goes to get out of poverty” (Johnson).
I also found it amazing this spread of disease was exactly what helped contribute to modern cities. People had slowly developed to accomodate these larger populations and led to some of the advances we know today. The chapter focusing on risks in living cities did instill a sense of fear in me though, that we are so helpless if it comes to things such as nuclear warfare. Yet it also comforted me to know that biological warfare could be halted in a matter of days, that we had gotten so advanced from the times of London’s cholera outbreak. Admittedly, there are still diseases we must work to find cures for such as cholera and HIV but the advances made in modern medicine and city society is amazing.

Like many of my classmates have mentioned, I found the last chapters of The Ghost Map to be just as interesting as the first, and I was excited to draw connections between some of the ideas Johnson brought up and some of the conversations we have had in class. What first came to mind was the idea of social prejudice, an incredibly large stumbling block in the way of real scientific answers in both the case of the London cholera epidemic and the HIV/AIDS one today. It is truly frightening to note that even in this era, with all of our technological advances and scientific research, prejudice can still cloud and warp our rationality.

But another part of the reading I found interesting and relatable in terms of our class was Johnson’s statement on page 125: “So often what is lacking in many of these explanations and prescriptions is some measure of humility, some sense that the theory being put forward is still unproven. It’s not just that the authorities of the day were wrong about miasma; it’s the tenacious, unquestioning way they went about being wrong.” I was so intrigued by this idea because I remember specifically complaining about the article we were given to read in class about a possible correlation between cholera and the environment-but my complaint was about that the writer lacked the ‘tenacious’ way of the London cholera writers. I had found the article in class to be too apprehensive when I read it. Because its authors were was too afraid to make any concrete claim, I thought, the article’s finding’s were unconvincing and even inconsequential. But after reading this passage in Johnson’s book, I began to reconsider, to appreciate the open mindedness and even humility of that article. Isn’s that method so much better, so much more conducive to the ever-changing world of scientific discovery? Our human desire for concrete answers and tangible results may cloud our judgements, so it is important to remember the dangerous tenacity and narrow-mindedness of the people Johnson mentions and always keep an open mind.

It is all too easy to draw parallels between the confusion brought on by nineteenth century London’s cholera outbreak and that of the United States’ HIV outbreak in the late twentieth century.  It seems that, without proper scientific evidence to show them the way, even professionals have a hard time breaking away from intuition.  In London, the only theory remotely applicable to cholera’s actual cause–John Snow’s theory of waterborne illness–was given virtually no attention by the media, while miasmic theories pervaded the public mind; in the case of early HIV in the U.S., the first noted cases of abnormal illness were attributed, somehow, to the infected being gay–or living a different “lifestyle” than the norm–and doctors didn’t stop to think that, perhaps, they were looking in the wrong direction.  In both events, the proponents of the most dominant theories ran with them, putting on the back burner, ignoring or all-too-quickly rejecting the ideas of those that would ultimately help the most.  How common is this occurrence during outbreaks of illness over time?  What would have happened if Snow had stopped investigating the root of the outbreak?  If he had not been so vigorous in his surveying of the area and its people?  If Henry Whitehead had not stepped in to convince the public?