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The Ghost Map
Steven Johnson
Book is about the August 1854 outbreak of cholera in London. It was centred around the waterpump Broad St in Soho
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John Snow was a consilient thinker. Consilience (literally a "jumping together" of knowledge) is when an induction obtained from one class of facts can be applied to a different class. Snow built bridges between scientific disciplines which were only just emerging mid-century.
When people looked at London in the early Nineteenth Century they saw a huge polluted mess of factories and slums which seemed destined only for ruin.
No-one had ever tried to pack 3 million people into 30 square miles before, so it seemed completely logical to expect it to self-destruct. The suspicion was that the very idea of building cities on the scale of London was a mistake which would soon be corrected.
Three related developments triggered the unprecedented intensification of energy flowing into London:
1. rationalisation of agriculture - 1 million labourers without work
2. coal and steam power of Industrial Revolution
3. railways and ships greatly expanded distance energy (food + raw materials + power) could travel
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Evolution in the early cities selected for beer drinkers. Brewed beer killed many water-borne diseases, so those who didn't have the gene for processing alcohol were much more likely to die young before passing on their deficient genes.
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Descendants of hunter-gatherers - Native Americans and Aborigines - were never forced through this genetic bottleneck, and so today show disproportionate rates of alcoholism. Simply because their ancestors didn't live in towns.
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Modern urbanisation has provided more solutions than problems. Cities are engines of wealth, innovation and creativity. Healthier than ruralbecause better hospitals, doctors, dentists and water.
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