‘The Ghost Map’ by Steven Johnson

  Take the historical facts of a cholera epidemic that ravaged London in 1854. Mingle with excerpts from the works of Charles Dickens, period scientists and Victorian notables. Stir in the techniques of Sherlock Holmes and garnish with the most horrific details that could boil from the mind of Stephen King. Read.
  "The Ghost Map," by Steven Johnson, is a fascinating, appalling look at an industrialized world still in its infancy when it comes to medicine, public health and disease control. Things we city-dwellers take for granted today — like functioning sewage systems and a clean water supply —just didn’t exist in a time when human waste was routinely flung out of windows or chucked into gutters.
  The absence of basic infrastructure in London’s teeming neighborhoods contributed to ravaging outbreaks of disease many educated minds of the 1850s wrongly attributed to bad air or "miasma." Others saw it as an affliction of the poor or a judgment from God. In the meantime, Londoners were drowning in their own filth, unaware that the real villain behind their scourge was a jelly-bean shaped microbe with a tail, vibrio cholerae.
  So grab a chair and prepare yourself to see how far we’ve come — and how little we’ve progressed — in the fight against epidemic outbreaks. Johnson draws on eyewitness accounts and the amateur investigations of a doctor and a clergyman to introduce us to 1854’s equivalent of patient zero.