Victorian London was the shit!

...Literally.

So, two of my particular interests in history--along with medieval history, pirates, the Egyptians, linguistic history and the histories of kickass ladies--are Victorian England and the history of disease. Most people who have known me for longer than thirty seconds are aware of the Victorian England one, and some people who have known me for less than thirty seconds know that too, at least when I am wearing my Kate Beaton Victorian T-shirt t-shirt. The disease one I talk less about, partly because I haven't read much on epidemiological history since my freshman year. Freshman year I did a paper for my Problems of Globalization class, basically looking at epidemics and pandemics as they are happening today and comparing/contrasting them with the conditions under which notable past epidemics/pandemics happened. I read a lot of really fun stuff about bubonic plague, one of the first major diseases to spread all around the world as early modern trade routes were established. (I highly recommend John Kelly's The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time, along with William H. McNeill's Plagues and Peoples.) The only cholera outbreaks I read about for that paper, however, involved modern pandemics in third world countries, particularly strains of El Tor cholera that hopped rides on plankton blooms and traveled from India to South America and I want to say this had something to do with climate change but, alas, it was five years ago and those notes are buried somewhere in my closet at my mother's house.

Anyway, I finally did something that I probably should have done a long time ago, and read a book on an epidemic disease in Victorian London. Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and how it changed Science, Cities and the Modern World tells the story of the Soho cholera epidemic of September 1854, the most acute cholera epidemic in history. It killed over 600 people in less than two weeks, in a neighborhood only a couple of blocks square. There are two main stories in The Ghost Map: One is the story of London's history of sanitation (or lack thereof); the other is the more immediate story of Dr. John Snow and Reverend Henry Whitehead's feat of medical sleuthing. The two of them managed to conclusively prove that cholera was a waterborne disease--a theory Dr. Snow had been working on for a while--and to map out the path of the Soho outbreak, down to finding the baby whose soiled diapers introduced the cholera to the specific water pump that infected the neighborhood.

While the story of Snow and Whitehead's research reads like a detective story--a really well-crafted detective story!--the story of London's sanitation issues reads more like horror. Victorian London was gross. The last major work done on its public sanitation infrastructure had happened sometime during the Elizabeth era. After the population explosion in the first half of the nineteenth century, London was literally swimming in its own shit. The Ghost Map takes us through London's disgustingly specific economy of waste, and the history of the London government's attempts to deal with it. The history of the answers that highly educated, otherwise very brilliant people came up with to the all-important questions of "What do we do with all of this poo?" and "Why is everyone so sick all the time?" is fascinating. Most Victorian medical scientists could only really conceive of two ways disease could be contracted--contagion (direct contact with another infected person) and miasma (airborne, except with zero conception of the existence of airborne germs, as germ theory hadn't been developed yet. Miasmatic theory was basically the notion that all bad smells were poisonous gases). This resulted in some interesting public health decisions, the worst of which was the idea that all of London's filth, rather than staying in the streets and cellars where it would infect people with unhealthy miasmas, should be flushed into the Thames... where most of South London got its drinking water. I am totally not kidding. Reading about pre-1900 urban environments will pretty much always make you want to throw up, but 19th century London really takes the cake for inducing pure, stomach-churning revulsion in the historian.

The actual "ghost map" the book is named after--Dr. Snow's map of the locations of the cholera cases--only takes up a chapter or two of the book, which seems to be about all it needs, but sort of feels like a letdown since it is both the title of the book and the illustration on the front cover. For some reason, the book does not include copies of Snow's maps--just a regular map of the neighborhood and its water pumps. Also, in the conclusion chapters in which the author is obligated to justify researching whatever s/he researched and prove it is intimately connected with everything else on the planet, Johnson really does just that--the end of the book goes all over the place, talking about everything from bioterrorism to Google Maps, attempting to bring together the impact of city culture, local knowledge, epidemiology, genetic engineering, green politics, and nuclear explosions into a comprehensive picture of, like, the organization of the entire world over the next hundred years. It's interesting stuff, but a bit meandering, and ends the book feeling like you've just had a really long, caffeinated conversation with Mr. Johnson at a coffeehouse somewhere hip in New York, rather than like you've just read an academically serious book about serious medical science and history and large numbers of people dying painful deaths in a short period of time. If you like that, you will like this book. If you find it kind of annoyingly incongruous, and have a strong stomach, you may like the first 80% of the book.

I am on the fence about the end. But I really did like the first 80%! And if you like reading about grossness, death, disease, painful things, embarrassing governmental missteps, bad Victorian medical science, breakthroughs in not-bad Victorian medical science, social science, clergypeople who aren't stupid (I always find them refreshing), real-life feats of Great Detective-ing, urban planning, things that affect population growth, things affected by population growth, reasons to be really happy you live in modern times, and poo, then you will like it too!

In other words... it's probably not for everyone. ;)