The Ghost Map

The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson gives an in depth account of how a disease can cause immense repercussions in the evolution of society. This story takes place in London in 1854 when there was an enormous outbreak of the disease known as Cholera. Cholera is a disease that wreaks havoc on the body causing deathly dehydration via loss of bodily fluids. This is not just the story of an outbreak. However it discusses many higher order-thinking points in regards to humans and city life. The author Steven Johnson uses this tale as a means to express some important societal lessons. There are a few main ideas that can be taken away from The Ghost Map; the first of which is that sanitation is immeasurably important in society. Another is that society…

I. Author Steven Berlin Johnson wrote The Ghost Map in 2006. Johnson attended Columbia and Brown University. He is the cofounder and editor-in-chief of FEED web magazine where science, technology, and personal experiences, and culture are all intertwined (Steven Johnson - stevenberlinjohnson.com). In addition to contributing to FEED, Johnson is also the cofounder of Patch, another website that relates online conversations to neighborhoods in the real-world. In addition to web magazines, he has…

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…

In The Ghost Map author Steven Johnson illustrates an episodic saga as Dr. John Snow traces throughout London in order to solve one of the greatest epidemic of his time. As Steven Johnson creates the nauseating tale in the early parts of the novel as sanitation engineering was not at its best during the years of 1854, with John Snow enduring the sickening outbreak of diseases and his incentive to find out the causes and why this is happening to everyone around him. This day and age the role of…

The “The Ghost Map” is a book written by Steven Johnson, a well known science aurthorauthor. In the book, the author explains to us why urban planning is necessary to prevent deadly diseases, such as the deadly cholera outbreak. This book is a chronicle about an event that began on August 28, 1854, on Broad Street. A five-month-old infant named Frances Lewis, had developed diarrhea and exhaustion, which were both symptoms of cholera. Dr.William Rogers had taken care her, but she died…

The Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson, is a fascinating, vivid, and compelling account of how London’s 1854 cholera epidemic shaped the field of epidemiology and profoundly impacted our understanding of cities and disease. The diligent and remarkably multidisciplinary work of physician John Snow and curate Henry Whitehead proved that scientific methods of investigation could be applied to medicine and human populations to solve problems in society, on both local and government-wide levels. After…

Reflection Paper on Ghost Map John Snow is recognized as one of the founding fathers of modern epidemiology. In Ghost Map, it gives the details of John Snow’s efforts to discover that cholera was a water-borne illness. What John Snow did differently was he mapped the cases, and the map essentially represented each death as a bar. On the Broad Street pump, which was free, public source of drinking water for a long time, it located a well beneath Golden Square, to some of London’s poorest and…

The Ghost Map, written by Steven Johnson, follows two researchers, John Snow and Henry Whitehead, who are dedicated to solve the Cholera outbreak in London. The Cholera outbreak started in 1854 when a little girl was infected and her contents contaminated a water pump on Broad Street. Soon, London was filled with infected residents and no one could figure out what caused it. Thankfully, John Snow, Henry Whitehead, and other characters were able to understand and piece together how the Cholera…

The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson is a true story of a terrifying outbreak of cholera and how Dr. John Snow and reverend Henry Whitehead used their knowledge of the disease to find out how prevalent it was over the whole city of London. The disease may have been unfamiliar to them, but common to the millions of people around the country, whose living conditions and sanitation processes were not as good or advanced as theirs. The story reflects the world through the wide varieties of disciplines,…

I enjoyed reading about Robert Koch and John Snow again. What I did not know about Koch was how extensively he traveled and worked on various diseases (Farmer, Kim, Kleinman, & Basilico, 2013, p. 41-42). The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson is a very interesting book about Snow's discovery and how the pump handle had to be removed to prevent people from using the pump even though they knew the water was contaminated. I was totally surprised by the lecture “Quinine and Penicillin”, the United States…