Word: snow
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Even so, Snow's map, says Johnson, "was a 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...
...center of his tale is John Snow, the doctor who overcame the medical establishment's entrenched belief that cholera lurked in the city's "miasma," its bad air, and proved the true cause by painstakingly charting the contagion against London's water supply. The resulting map provided a founding case study for epidemiology. But as readers of previous books by Johnson might expect - among them Mind Wide Open and last year's defense of popular culture, Everything Bad Is Good For You - the author has also chosen his subject for the light it can shine into other corners...
...fair, the public-health authorities had begun works to improve the city's infrastructure. But their refusal to retreat from the miasma theory, and the extra piles of atmospheric data they commissioned to prop it up, cost thousands more lives. Snow's victory over the miasmatists wasn't conceded until years after his death in 1858. Some never relented, such as London's otherwise enlightened Health Board chief, Edwin Chadwick, who went to his grave still propounding that belief in 1890 - seven years after the German scientist Robert Koch definitively identified Vibrio cholerae...
...photography the editors frequently use to illustrate their points about melting ice caps, advancing deserts and rising sea levels. They have a particular thing for discouraging compare-and- contrast shots of sights like Iraqi wetlands before and after being drained by Saddam Hussein, the disappearance of the once permanent snow on the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro and, worst of all, the sinister and apparently unstoppable spread of Las Vegas. So it's true: Céline Dion may be as much of a threat to the planet as global warming...
DIED. James Kim, 35, editor for the Internet site CNET, 11 days after he and his family were stranded in the snow following a series of wrong turns while driving near the Oregon coast on vacation; of hypothermia; in Josephine County, Ore. Rescuers found his body last Wednesday, four days after he set out on foot to seek help for wife Kati and their daughters Penelope, 4, and Sabine, 7 months. With temperatures in the 20s, Kim eventually left the road and climbed down a hill. Had he kept walking in the direction the car had been headed, he would...