The Ghost Map, written by Steven Johnson, is a nonfiction book centered on a Vibrio cholera bacterium- also called cholera- outbreak in London in eighteen fifty-four. Tellingly enough, the central theme of The Ghost Map is Illness, Death, and the Unknown; with strong underlying themes of the Scientific Process and Urban Growth and Planning, along with weaker undertones of Class Prejudice. Setting up the rest of the book is the main purpose of the first chapter, introducing how unsanitary eighteen fifty-four London, England with ‘recycling’ oriented jobs- such as pure-finders collecting dog fecal matter and bone-pickers cleaning off the meat of carcassses- as well as patient zero, a baby girl in Soho, who’s soiled diaper began the epidemic
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Johnson uses comparison- “Hall's list is a kind of straitjacket for an eventual document. You can tell from just scanning the instructions what kind of document they will ultimately produce: a rich and impossibly detailed inventory of the smells of Soho circa 1854.” (Page 165)-, repetition- "Some of those forces were ideological in nature, matters of social prejudice and convention. Some revolved around conceptual limitations, failures of imagination and analysis. Some involve the basic wiring of the human brain itself. Each on its own might not have been strong enough to persuade an entire public-health system to empty raw sewage into the Thames. But together they created a kind of perfect storm of error." (Page 126), and metaphors-"In a very practical sense, no one had ever tried to pack nearly three million people inside a thirty-mile circumference before. The metropolitan city, as a concept, was still unproven. It seemed entirely likely to many reasonable citizens of Victorian England—as well as to countless visitors from overseas—that a hundred years from now the whole project of maintaining cities of this scale would have proved a passing fancy. The monster would eat itself." (Page 89)- to nail in the theme of Illness, Death, the Unknown, and the other tones of The Ghost
Johnson uses comparison- “Hall's list is a kind of straitjacket for an eventual document. You can tell from just scanning the instructions what kind of document they will ultimately produce: a rich and impossibly detailed inventory of the smells of Soho circa 1854.” (Page 165)-, repetition- "Some of those forces were ideological in nature, matters of social prejudice and convention. Some revolved around conceptual limitations, failures of imagination and analysis. Some involve the basic wiring of the human brain itself. Each on its own might not have been strong enough to persuade an entire public-health system to empty raw sewage into the Thames. But together they created a kind of perfect storm of error." (Page 126), and metaphors-"In a very practical sense, no one had ever tried to pack nearly three million people inside a thirty-mile circumference before. The metropolitan city, as a concept, was still unproven. It seemed entirely likely to many reasonable citizens of Victorian England—as well as to countless visitors from overseas—that a hundred years from now the whole project of maintaining cities of this scale would have proved a passing fancy. The monster would eat itself." (Page 89)- to nail in the theme of Illness, Death, the Unknown, and the other tones of The Ghost