The Ghost Map Chapters 1-4

Location of story

Soho London; a metropolis of more than 2 million people

one of the 1st modern cities in the world

lacked infrastructure necessary to support its dense population

What was the disease that seized london in the ghost map?

Vibrio cholerae

What infrastructure problems are identified in the story?

lack of garbage removal, clean water, sewers--the city was the perfect breeding ground for a terrifying disease that no knew during this time how to cure.

Who are the main protagonists in the story?

Reverend Henry Whitehead and Dr. John Snow, cholera, and a vast city

Who is Henry Whitehead

--had faith in the benevolent God but is shaken by the random nature of the victims.

--affable (friend, good-nature) clergyman at St. Luke Church on Berwick Street

-- attended school at Chatham House (father headmaster)

-- top student; attended Lincoln College at Oxford

More on Whitehead

-- like to drink (stay a local tavern)

-- ordained in London

-- liberal in political views but conservative in morals

-- knew many people by name

Who is Dr. John Snow?

had ideas about contagion but was dismissed by the scientific community that cholera outbreaks was from the contaminated water.

apothecary ( a person who prepared and sold medicines and drugs)

Facts about Dr. John Snow

1. leading pioneer in the development of anesthesia in Britain using ether and chloroform to reduce pain created for anesthesia and arsenic to preserve dead bodies.

2. father of epidemiology

3. was a vegetarian and a teetotaler (person who never drink)

epidemiology

-- the study of the incidence, prevalence, and source of disease in large populations.

-- investigates both epidemic (i.e. episodic) and endemic (i.e. always present) diseases.

-- focuses on groups rather than individuals and often takes a historical perspective.

-- John Snow was an early practitioner.

Empirical mind

-- relation to the natural sciences, is the practice of relying on observation, data collection, and experimentation like John Snow and Henry Whitehead

What is cholera?

an intestinal infection caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae a waterborne disease

-- a microscopic organism that consists of single cell harboring strands of DNA

-- doesn't have organelles or cell nuclei (prokaryotic)

-- have 100,000 separate bacterial cells that use naked strands of genetic code that need host to replicate and survive

How important is cholera as a disease during these time in the ghost map?

10,000 people would died in a 48 hr. period. Outbreaks occurred heavy rainfalls came and over ran cesspools into the well water of Broad Street. Feces entered the drinking water supply.

How did the people get it?

People became infected by swallowing water or food contaminated with the cholera bacteria or by coming into contact with the stool or vomit of a person infected with cholera. Cholera spread due to inadequate water treatment, poor sanitation, and inadequate hygiene.

What are the symptoms of cholera?

diarrhea(rice watery stool), abdominal cramps, vomiting, leg cramps. The rapid loss of fluid may cause dehydration and shock. Without treatment available people died within hours up to 48 hrs.

When and where did Dr. Snow encounter cholera

Newcastle in 1831/2 during his apprenticeship at the age of 14. He treated the survivors of the Killingworth Colliery

What did he observe while treating local miners of Killingworth Colliery?

He observed bad sanitary conditions in the mines

saw that the workers ate and defecated in the same locate of the caverns. witness that cholera came from an outbreak of social conditions of impoverished workers

When did Snow write his first paper?

1841 entitled "Asphyxia and the Resuscitation of New-born Children"

When did Snow write about Cholera?

1849: On the Mode of Communication of Cholera: Journals dismissed book saying that the book fail to proof that the occurence of any one case could be clearly and unambiguously assigned to the contaminated water.

How did Snow use anesthesia is the UK?

On April 1853, Snow administered obstetric anesthesia to Queen Victoria on the birth of Prince Leopold.

What did Soho sound like during the outbreak of Cholera?

The book states that the air was cold, solitary desolation about the noiseless streets but normally the streets were busy, crowded, full of live. One could hear sound of voices coming near, cars and foot traffic, open the door of shops but during the outbreak no cars, no voices

The sights of London

would see drunken men, the homeless individuals but during the outbreak people stayed in their homes

Charles Dickens

--1833 publish his observation about London in Our Mutual Friend. He walked the streets of Soho, listening and mimicking people

--believed that civilization produced barbarity as an unavoidable waste product. He said that "barbarians weren't storming the gates; they were being bred from within."

-- wrote Hard Times and published in Household Words talking against the industrial coketowns

Henry Mayhew

1844 pioneering work, London Labour and the London Poor. He characterize the bone-picker, rag- gathers, sewer hunters, Tosher, night soil men, dustman, mud-larks and Shoremen

Richard the Raker

1326; fell into a cesspool and drowned in human shit

Who was Earl of Craven

--during the Great Plague of 1665 he purchased a block of land in a semirural area in near Central London called Soho Field.

--built 36 small houses for people with the plague

-- rest of land used for mass grave

-- dozens died nightly

-- people thought the dead was infecting them and causing death

Karl Marx

--Prussian immigrant

-- lived in Soho

--"radical" philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist, and socialist

What type of environment is Soho in the Ghost Map?

share of industry: slaughterhouses, manufacturing plants, tripe boilers. had a mixture of working poor and the entrepreneurial middle class.

John Nash and Regent Street

-- dividers between the rich and the poor

-- had few conduits (channel thru) that open directly onto Regent Street

-- Nash designed street

-- street designed as a barricade fro the Marylebone Park where Prince Regent's's Carlton House was located

Benjamin Hall

-- continued the sanitation campaign started by Edwin Chadwick

Timeline of the Ghost Map

1780's - Industrial Revolution begins in England

1798 - Publication of "An Essay on the Principle of Population" by Thomas Malthus, which fueled the debate about the size of the population in Britain

1813 - Birth of John Snow

1831-32 - Cholera outbreak in London kills over 6500 people

1837 - Queen Victoria took the throne at age 18

Charles Dickens publishes Oliver Twist, drawing attention to Britain's poor

1845 - Beginning of Irish Potato Famine

1848 - Public Health Act in England creates Board of Health and local boards of health, largely due to the efforts of Edwin Chadwick

Publication of The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

1848-1849 - Cholera outbreak in London kills over 14000 people

1853-1856 - Crimean War (Russia vs. Ottoman Empire, Great Britain and France)

1854 - Cholera outbreak near Broad Street pump

Little baby girl Lewis dies on August 28 after bout with vomiting and watery green stool.

1858 - Death of John Snow

Thomas and Sara Lewis

1. lived in an eleven roomhouse with 18 other inhabitants on 40 broad street

2. had a little boy who died at ten month old

3. had a little girl Sara was unable to breast feed due to her health problems

4. baby girl ate ground rice and milk from the bottle; sick in 2 months

5. Sara put soiled cloth diapers in tepid water and the tossed foul water in cesspool.

Quagmire p.2

a soft boggy area of land that gives way underfoot (swamp)

Excrement

people of London were eating on a regular waste matter discharged from the bowel (feces) p.2 and 40-42

Fulminate

p. 4 protest against the system that allowed people to live in waste

Perpendadores

p. 3 waste pickers that operate in landfills while living there with their families. they pick solid waste that can be recycled

Itinerant

p. 4 a person that travel from place to place looking for somewhere to stay, hobo, homeless, underclass

Fecundity

p. 5 based on the demography (population) and biology around that area of land. It is the actual reproductive rate of the population

zooxanthellae

p.6 a yellowish brown symbiotic dinoflagellate present in large numbers in the cytoplasm of many marine invertebrates

Pestiferous

p. 14 harboring infection and disease

Taylorite

a form of Calvinism that maintains that every person has a free will, and that makes a distinction between depravity, as the tendency to commit sins as a voluntary choice of evil actions (felt this is why the poor was dying)

The Lancet

a weekly peer-reviewed general medical journal

Inexorable

p. 16 impossibe to stop or prevent the need for shelter so people moved in the "pesthouse field" of Cavern in the Golder square area.

Burgeoning

p. 16 a new neighborhood (Mayfair) that begins to grow or increase rapidly

-- 20 residents in 1740

--1757 William Blake born on 28 Broad Street; a famous poet and artist

Trope

p. 18 a figure of speech that artist, poets and writing would known.

Opulent

p. 19 luxurious and lavish area and people in Mayfair and Kensington surrounded by the working poverty and foul-smelling industry

Tony Enclave

p.20 very expensive and fashionable which was west of Regent street in Mayfair

Cordon sanitaire

p. 20 a guarded measure to prevent anyone from leaving an area infected by a disease and thus spreading it.. Also prevent communication from undesirable people

Veritable

p. 21 use as an intensifier, oftern to qualify a metaphor to increase prices and commerce

Index Case

-- first case of a disease in a group or population.

-- serves to call attention to the presence of the disease.

--Finding the index case for the Soho outbreak of 1854 was very important to John Snow as it helped him support his theory of waterborne transmission of cholera.

-- The location of the index case was in a house whose

residents fouled (contaminated) a popular well from which Soho residents drew water.

Maverick

-- a person who thinks independently.

-- refer to an intellectual, artist, scientist, politician or anyone who takes a stand that is apart or different from

his or her associates.

--applied to John Snow who regularly did not let the popular scientific ideas or the mindset of his time deter him from making scientific inquiries based on different assumptions. Whitehead like people with maverick ideas

Miasma

-- describe foul smelling air, or an oppressive or unpleasant

atmosphere also known as "night air."

The miasma theory ( miasmatic theory)

-- argued that diseases such as cholera, chlamydia or

the Black Death were caused by a miasma.

-- The theory held that the origin of epidemics was due

to a miasma, emanating from rotting organic matter.

Tumult

p. 26 a loud, confused noise, especially one caused by a large mass of people like in Soho

Eddies

p. 29 certain patterns moving in a circular way in a chaotic area.

Queue

p.30 a small line of people waiting their turn around the vendors on 40th Broad st.

Symbiosis

-- two dissimilar organisms living together. The relationship may be mutually beneficial or one organism may gain a benefit while the other does not. The concept describes a bacteria which needs a human host to provide a food source (think Vibrio cholerae) as well as the human body which utilizes bacteria (e.g. some strains of e. coli)

as part of its digestive processes.

What did Soho look and smell like in late August?

--unavoidable smells of cesspools and sewers from factories and furnaces

--had livestock like horses, cows, sheep, oxen and the animal feces in city center

-- one vendor sold 30,000 sheep in 2 days

-- blood from the slaughter of livestock drained in to gulley holes of the street.

Pets in Soho

-- man lived with 27 dogs in single room and left feces on roof of building

--charwoman (clean houses or businesses) had 17 dogs, cats and rabbits in single room

Broad Street Pump

-- known as a reliable source of clean well water

-- extended 24 ft. below surface; goes to Hyde Park

-- people from Rupert St. and Little Marlborough drink the water

-- taste colder than rival pumps (hint of carbonation)

Eley Brothers

-- owned a factory with 150 employees that manufactured percussion cap for firearm-- father started company

-- sent a bottle of broad street water to mother on Monday and she shared it with niece

People who drank the water

1. Chemist son had a glass with pudding

2. Mr. G (tailor) wife got several pitcher for him

3. coffeehouse brewed coffee with pump water

4. 10 yr. old girl

People who did not drink water

1. John Gould - noted ornithologist ( zoologist who focuses on birds)

2. Thomas Lewis

How did Mr. G die?

--had food poisoning symptoms but this was not the case

--had a foreboding ( feeling that something bad will happen) sense

-- on Thursday had muscle spasms, vomiting and sharp abdominal pains and thirsty

-- had rice water stool

-- had blue skin and lips, eyes sunk and shrunk

-- dead in 48 hrs. Sick Wed. died Friday

Diet and Sanitary conditions

-- no refrigeration

-- impure water supplies

-- excessive consumption of beer, spirits and coffee

Quotidian

p. 31 binge drinking of Goldern square neighorhood on oppressive days

harbinger

p. 33 annoucing or signaling the approach of death which would be the stomach pain or watery stool

cholera origin

for 2 thousand yrs. confined to India and Asian subcontinent

came from British soldier stationed in Ganjam, India

William Sproat

1st to perish from cholera in England

John James

died a yr. after Sproat in 1838

--20,000 dead in Wales

-- 1848-49 50,000 died

Cholera Bacterium

view in electron microscope

-- looks like a swimming peanut

-- a curved rod with a thin, rotating tail called the flagellum that propels the organism

-- need 10 million per mL of water to be detectable by human eye

-- 200 million in glass of water

Dehydration

-- reduction in volume of blood circulation

----Blood thickens

-- hard to pump faster to maintain blood pressure and keep vital organs going

-- shut down gallbladder and spleen

-- vessels in extremities constrict (tingling sensation)

with the cholera bacteria the brain is the last to go so victims are aware of the attack.

Uremia

Waste products accumulate in the blood; person become unconscious (coma) and vital organs shut down

Purgative

p. 50 laxative; in the story they used castor oil, brandy and rhubarb to cure cholera

Exacerbate

p. 51 the many remedies that made the problem of cholera worse; needed rehydration

Orthodoxy

p. 53 Whitehead wanted to challenge accepted theory about the deaths of the people.

wanted to submit to a empirical view (data, statistics)

Platitude

normal way of thinking; moral content that's used too often

John Rogers

--Medical officer who had practice on Dean Street

-- heard about entire household with the disease

-- people went from healthy to death in 12 hours

-- Dr. Harrison a friend died from the disease

-- there when baby Lewis died

Whitehead visit family of six

--Waterstone's which consistent two grown sons, two adolescent daughters and parents

-- girl dying but surrounded my brother and neighbor

-- mother and sister dead

-- neighbors suffered in isolation also Cholera

bildungsroman

p. 60 John Snow used novel education during the temperance mvmt. which is a social mvmt against the consumption of alcoholic beverages.

eschewed

meaning John Snow Deliberately avoided horse and carriage and walked for miles instead

garrulous

John Snow was not talkative and friendly. He was reserved and uncommunicative in speech (taciturn) p. 60

Surgeon in chief G. B. Childs disagree with smells findings. And told doctors to prescribe opium to treat the bacterial disease

In 1839 in the Lancet

William Morton

October 1846 at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston gave the first demonstration of using ether an anesthetic

James Robinson

Use ether on his patients to perform a successful extraction

John Snow and ether gas

--Problem with ether was the dosage

-- a gas concentration and temperature

-- created a table of calculation for the strength of ether vapors

-- collaborated with Daniel Ferguson (made inhaler to control dosage)

-- use Julius Jeffrey to method to deliver gas

Consilient thinker

linked together principles from different disciplines,

especially when forming a comprehensive theory. John Snow exhibited consilient thinking. Hedrew upon his broad background and used insights from many different disciplines to form his ideas and hypotheses. (p.67)

Consilience of Inductions

Test of the truth of a theory in which it occurs.

Contagion theory

Believe that the agent was passed from person to person

William Farr

Public official (demographer)tracked trends births, deaths, marriages in England and Wales

Snow used Farr's weekly records of birth and death and they developed a symbiotic relationship

wife died of tb

-- tabulated cholera deaths by elevation looking for correlation

--find people living in high elevation safer because they had cleaner water

John Harnold

Seaman from Hamburg

true cause of Blenkinsopp malady because the slept in same room

John Snow theory

Londoners that lived below the Thames river more prone to the cholera disease because of the water supplier

Experimentum crucis

crucial experiment that is capable of decisively determining whether or not a particular hypothesis or theory is superior to all other hypotheses or theories whose acceptance is currently widespread in the scientific community

children with cholera

62 % of recorded deaths of kids under the age of five

Arthur Iberall

proposed that pattern of human organization could be understood as social equivalent of patterns formed by molecules in response to changing energy states

phase transitions or bifurcation

dramatic shifts from one state to another p. 93

Tea Trade

became national beverage of the time; stable in working class diet (p. 95)

-- brewed tea possesses antibacterial properities that help ward off waterborne diseases because the tannic acid released in steeping process kills off bacteria (other part leaves during boiling of water)

Nascent

p. 95 new taste for tea; something that is just coming into existence

Latinate phrase

having the character of latin used against Snow before.

Farr added age, sex, elevation levers to cholera victims stats. also tracked where people got their water