The first man is John Snow, a doctor and renowned anesthesiologist, whose theory (one that is accepted today as medical fact) that cholera was contracted through drinking contaminated water was at odds with the then-popular theory of “miasma,” or that people contracted cholera through breathing in foul air. The book follows two men who in different ways were instrumental in uncovering the true source of the epidemic, and who ended up becoming friends and working together. Each chapter of the nine-chapter book, excluding the conclusion and the epilogue, is subtitled with a day of the week.
The book unfolds over the course of a week in September 1854, when the outbreak was at its height. The cesspool in turn contaminated the nearby Broad Street well, infecting many of the citizens who drank from it. The first cholera victim in the neighborhood was an infant-known in the book as baby Lewis-whose soiled diaper was flung into the cesspool at the foot of the Lewis household. The outbreak was concentrated in the Golden Square neighborhood of Soho and claimed hundreds of lives over the span of a week. The immediate subject of The Ghost Map is the cholera outbreak that took place in London in 1854.
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