This Is the Book You Need to Read Right Now

It will make 2020 feel better and worse all at the same time.

Picture this: A city gripped in fear as a deadly disease tears through the population. Misinformation is rampant. Poverty and inequity are intensified as city officials search for ways to keep the death count low.

Sound familiar?

The Ghost Map, written by Steven Johnson and published by Riverhead Books in 2007 is about a cholera outbreak in London, England in 1854, not about the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.

When I first read it with students in my high school biology class in 2018, it was a nice story with a lot of opportunities to talk about science and the history of medicine.

This summer, as I started planning for a schoolyear that was riddled with unknowns, I decided to use the book again as part of my science curriculum.

What a difference two years can make!

As I reread the book in 2020, it strikes me again and again as a shocking example of how history repeats itself. To help you understand what I mean, let me start by giving you a very brief summary:

In August of 1854, a baby died of cholera. At the time, there wasn’t a general understanding of microorganisms and how they cause disease. As a result, nobody was too concerned about drinking water tainted with fecal matter.

When you reflect on the situation armed with today’s understanding of germ theory, it’s no surprise that when the baby’s soiled diapers were rinsed out near a water supply, the deadly cholera bacteria quickly sickened and killed many people in the city.

At the time though, the generally accepted idea was that ‘poisoned air’ traveled through the city making people sick. It was a hard theory to disprove since air currents and bad smells are difficult to track. Even more problematic than this theory, called miasma theory, was that it prevented people — even doctors, scientists, and health officials — from considering alternative theories.

Enter the Netflix-worthy hero, Doctor John Snow. Spoiler alert here: John Snow uses data to make a map of all the people who have died from cholera — basically an early form of contact tracing. He deduces that they all have consumed water from one public pump.

After a great ordeal, he convinces city officials to remove the pump handle, rendering it useless. The tainted water from the pump becomes inaccessible and new cases of cholera cease.

Sure, it’s a nice story that supports scientific thinking and has a cool twist at the end.

But the parallels between the 1850s cholera epidemic and the pandemic we are living through today are fascinating, terrifying and a little bit hopeful.

Here are some examples:

The Power of Inaccurate Theories

Before germs were well understood, Miasma Theory was accepted as fact. The popular idea that ‘bad air’ could spread disease caused people to do things that unintentionally spread diseases more quickly than ever. For example, many homes had cesspits filled with sewage in their basements.

When cholera started spreading, the believed that they needed to rid their homes of these bad smells. And where do you empty your cesspit when you live in a busy, overpopulated city? Directly into the street, spreading bacteria and other pathogens far and wide.

Today, we know enough not to dump our shit in the streets.

But there are plenty of other mistaken ideas that take a toll on society. My next-door neighbor refuses to wear a mask and won’t let his wife or kids wear them either because “Carbon Dioxide is the most toxic gas known to man.”

Not true, but his — and other peoples’ beliefs in unproven ideas — still impact the rest of the population. As I explained to them, an idea doesn’t need to be accurate to be powerful, whether it’s the 1850s or the mid 2000s.

My students were shocked to realize that even with the staggering amount of scientific knowledge we’ve gained over the last 170 years, human nature is still such that we’ll believe all types of ideas despite all types of evidence proving that they are false.

History is Made from the Bottom Up

There is a passage in the book that talks about the kind of historic events that are ‘self-conscious’ in nature. The speeches, the battles, the assassinations.

But then it discusses another type of historic event. It’s the ordinary person who unknowingly passed cholera onto his mother in a bucket of water. It’s the brewery workers opting to drink beer instead of the tainted water from the pump.

These are the people whose actions gave the eventual hero John Snow the date he needed to solve the mystery and put another nail in the coffin of miasma theory.

Each one of us is living a type of bottom-up history right now. Our actions — for better or for worse — will shape how this pandemic is recorded in history. I think about the attendees at the Biogen conference in February who sat through lectures, ate catered lunches, and shook hands with no knowledge of what was to come. Little did they know that the conversations, laughs, and hugs they shared would kickstart the pandemic that has seeped into every area of our lives.

I encourage my students by telling them that we can be a part of history in a positive way too. We can do our best to stay safe and adhere to CDC guidelines. We can endure, we can support each other and we can serve as examples of people who can still safely learn, read, interact, and survive.

The Amplification of Unproven Ideas

Steven Johson puts it best when he describes the 1850s as a period of

“strange historical overlap, one which we have largely outgrown — the period after the rise of mass communications but before the emergence of a specialized medical science.”

He goes onto explain that the publication of newspapers coupled with increasing literacy rates allowed common people the opportunity to share their ideas far and wide. He includes examples of this in the form of letters written to newspapers suggesting wacky, unproven folk cures for cholera.

These letters were published — even welcomed — because the nascent field of medicine hadn’t decided who could and couldn’t dispense and invent medicines, treat patients, and share their experiences far and wide.

When I read this section with my students, they immediately jumped on the phrase “largely outgrown.”

In 2007, this may have been the case. But these 2020 teenagers laughed at the idea that we’ve ‘outgrown’ an era when anyone’s unfounded ideas about medicine can be spread far and wide. Before I could ask them to mute their mics, they were pasting links to crazy Covid-19 cures like colloidal silver and hydroxyquinone pills that anyone with a credit card can order online.

For many of us, when we were growing up, facts were facts. They were securely anchored in the Encyclopedia Brittanica sets collecting dust at our grandparents’ houses. But for these kids, facts and truth don’t exist. What’s real is open to interpretation. Find someone who agrees with what you say, and you can be an instant expert.

For anyone who feels like 2020 is an unprecedented time, maybe you’re wrong. Maybe 2020 already happened in the 1850s. How’s that for a fact?

Where’s the Pump Handle?

The final reason you should read this book is that it can reframe how you think about the Covid-19 pandemic.

Reflecting on the 1854 cholera pandemic, it seems like such a simple, clean solution to the problem. No more pump handle, no more cholera.

The global pandemic is of far greater proportions than the 1854 cholera outbreak. But the scientific principles of observation and methodical study that John Snow used then are still tried and true today.

There isn’t a snappy, magic solution to the pandemic. Yet.

But there are people — smart, methodical, trustworthy, people — laboring away. In labs, on computers, in factories, they work, piecing together data, looking for patterns, and searching for the elusive 2020 version of the pump handle.

I know I wrote a lot about this book, but I promise, Steven Johnson’s writing is far better than mine, so you should still go read it for yourself. If you’re less of a reader and more of a watcher, you can also check out the author’s 10-minute synopsis here. Of course, you can find the book on Amazon, but why not strap on your mask and find a local bookstore to support?

If you need more books to read, try these: