The Ghost Map Sparknotes

INTRODUCTION

Steve Berlin Johnson published a nonfiction novel in 2006 called The Ghost Map which discusses various cholera outbreaks in Victorian London. Cholera was first believed by the majority of people, including physicians and scientists, to be spread through a poisonous atmosphere; this is called the miasma theory. When John Snow began to say contaminated water was the cause, he was continuously put down by the scientific community for lacking proof. By describing John Snow’s attempts to refute the miasma theory and prove that cholera is spread through water contamination, Johnson shows that most scientific discoveries are made through hours upon hours of work rather than a single breakthrough.

In his short article “The importance

During the 1848 epidemic, Snow noticed that someone who had direct contact with a cholera victim could remain unaffected, but some who had no direct contact could become ill from living in the same neighborhood. From this observation, Snow built his hypothesis that cholera is waterborne. He supported it based on the outbreak on Thomas Street in July 1894 and a map of London’s water sources along with official death charts. When he published his theory, however, the scientific community was skeptical and dismissed his claims as nothing more than a correlation between contaminated water and cholera deaths. A few years later, Snow was able to validate his claims during the Broad Street pump incident. When he was not working as an anesthesiologist, Snow was compiling statistics on and creating maps of cholera deaths and where the victims received their water. Snow’s new evidence led to a paradigm shift nearly a decade after he posed his initial theory. Through the story of John Snow, Johnson shows that scientific progress is gradual and often not filled with spectacular breakthroughs. Science is a field where large sums of evidence need to be present to support a claim, especially claims that alter previous