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| A variant of Dr. Snow's map, showing 1854 cholera cases in London clustered around the Broad Street pump (click to enlarge) |
2006 book, selected for Portland's Everybody Reads 2010 program, is a gripping and rigorous work of historical nonfiction and interdisciplinary analysis. It shares many urban concepts with Jeb Brugmann's Welcome to the Urban Revolution and David Owen's Green Metropolis, but approaches them differently. "The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World"
chronicles the 1854 cholera epidemic that struck London, a vast city overwhelmed by accumulations of human waste. City leaders and physicians, deeply convinced of the notion that miasmas, or foul smells, cause cholera despite clear evidence to the contrary, were ineffective and often counterproductive in combating the disease. "The Ghost Map"
tells the story of physician John Snow and cleric Henry Whitehead, who traced the source of disease to a neighborhood pump contaminated by seepage from an adjacent cesspool. 
