Ya me ha llegado mi primer regalito de navidades, si excluimos el que me hice yo mismo. Se trata del libro The Ghost Map de Steven Johnsion
De la contraportada:
The Ghost Map is the story of how a deadly battle between man and microbe came to define the modern era.
At 6am on 28 August 1854, the city of London struggled to sleep at the end of an oppressively hot summer. But at 40 Broad Street, Soho, Sarah Lewis was awake tending to her feverish baby girl. As she threw a used bucket of water into the cesspool at the front of her lodgings, it marked the start of the cholera epidemic that would consume 50,000 lives in England and Wales.
Steve Johnson takes us day by day through what happened and re-creates a London full of dust heaps, furnaces and slaughterhouses; where a ghost class of bone-pickers, rag gatherers , dredger men and mud-larks scavenged off waste; where families were crammed into tiny rooms and cartloads of bodies wheeled down tghe streets. And at the heart of the story are two very different men; Doctor John Snow, a vegetarian, teetotaller anaesthesiologist, and Reverend Henry Whitehead, an affable clergy man and Soho resident. Though they used different methods, ultimately both the man of god and the man of science would come to dicover, throught a mixture of research, map-making and local knowledge, that cholera was spread by water and not borne on the air as most believed. By solvin the mystery of Broad Street they would forge an unlikely friendship, and ultimately defeat their era’s greatest killer.
Steven Johnson interwaves this extraordinary story with a wealth of ideas about how cities work, ecosystems thrive and cultures connect. He argues that, with half the planet’s population set to be urban, today’s megacities could soon be wrestling with the same problems and that, just as in 1854, science could be our salvation.
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