Word: cholera
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...Faust’s husband, Charles Rosenberg, the former chair of the Penn History Department who is best known for his work on cholera in 19th century America, also moved to Harvard and is now the Monrad professor of social sciences here...
...Learning from Past Outbreaks Re your review of Steven Johnson's book Ghost Map, about a cholera outbreak in Victorian London [Dec. 18]: In a world of emerging infectious diseases, fear of pandemics and a growing threat of biological terrorism, it was interesting to read about the 1854 cholera epidemic. As a microbiologist and historian of cholera epidemics in the Middle East, I believe that a multinational effort and huge budgets are essential to improve the medical care and public-health infrastructure in the Third World. The developed countries are immune to cholera, but, since they have most...
...transformative moment in the history of cities." And it was a remarkable success for "consilient" thinking, a philosophy formulated in the 1840s in which a cohesive theory from one discipline is used to inform ideas from another. Snow's work on administering ether as an anesthetic convinced him cholera was ingested, not inhaled. As a physician he understood how disease spread through a body. As a resident of Soho, he had the local knowledge to realize that the contagion radiated from a single source. "When you look at cholera at any one of those levels, it's hard...
...tripled in just 50 years, there was nowhere to bury the dead, the sewage system leaked, the cesspools overflowed, and the whole lot drained into the Thames, the source of most of the city's drinking water. "A lot of people looked at the mess," says Johnson, "saw how cholera could wipe out 10% of the neighborhood in six days, and concluded that London would go the same way as ancient Rome...
...legacy of that process lies hidden beneath London's streets: 132 km long, the world's most elaborate sewer, which began construction in 1858, was completed in little more than a decade and is still a vital defense for a city that has not recorded a single outbreak of cholera since 1866. It's a testament to Victorian England's ability to construct grand solutions to big problems. That's a skill the modern world could use, says Johnson, noting that some 2 billion people are still at risk because they do not have access to clean water. "Unlike...