The Ghost Map Analysis

Johnson’s “The Ghost Map” gives a very detailed narrative of life in London during the mid-1850’s. We see a city full of growth on a massive scale. The population was growing exponentially, industrial technology allowed supply to keep up with demand, and Victorian ideas were bustling through the streets. However, the waste from this massive growth was piling up just as fast. London became the largest city in Europe all the while creating a breeding ground for disease. Johnson’s view of London allows us to critically examine the similarity and differences with other urban areas 150 years later. Political, social, and economic agendas within these urban areas have evolved as well. The accounts of John Snow and Henry Whitehead show how new ideas

People were classified socially and financially and prejudices were placed on them based on this classification. People that fell to the bottom of this social hierarchy were often degraded as a group. When the outbreak began, Londoners searched for a reason behind it. Seeing that most of the people affected were the lower class, many concluded that the victims simply deserved this for living a filthy life. “That selective attack appeared to confirm every elitist cliché in the book: the plague attacking the debauched and the destitute, while passing over the better sort that lived only blocks away” (20). This quote from Johnson showed how people viewed the social hierarchy, especially the suffering lower class. No sympathy was given and there was little time for it. This prejudice became a coping mechanism for the elite. Some even cited God as the reason for the outbreak as He was punishing the victims for living filthy lives or having “poor internal constitution”. This theory even affected the scientific community with the acceptance of the miasma theory of disease. Most doctors, aside from Snow, believed the theory at the time. This collective acceptance only hindered the discovery of a cure and pushed the elitist view of social status further. “Raw social prejudice also played a role…the miasma theory was regularly invoked to justify all sorts of groundless class and ethnic biases.” (132). This quote

Starting at the top of the hierarchy, we see how the financially well off were rarely affected by a social tragedy. They were effectively isolated from the outside world were the real work and progress was made and at the same time, they were almost immune to disease and other atrocities that gripped the working class. Lawmakers were trying to make progress for public health through sanitation reform and waste management but the lack of understanding within this community prevented progress and often made situations worse for the citizens. Working class people lived a grim life for the most part. Living in cramped and dirty homes, they were the real victims of this industrial age. These people were the most susceptible to disease because of their proximity to one another and they're having to live amongst vast amounts of waste. These points give us insight into how most lived in London at the time, but I think the most important would be the development of new ways to approach problems on a scientific level. Johnson’s account of John Snow shows how he was a huge piece to the puzzle of the developing scientific method of research. “Snow was a truly consilient thinker…Snow’s work was constantly building bridges between different disciplines, some of which barely existed as functional sciences in his day, using data on one scale of investigation to make predictions about behavior on other scales.”