We were in Edinburgh yesterday and came upon a shop in George Street called Hadeel, which sells beautiful embroidery from Palestine. One of the volunteers, Katie McNeill, reads non-fiction and spoke about a book, written by Steven Berlin Johnstone called The Ghost Map. I looked it up. I’m going to read it.
It is about a cholera epidemic in London in 1866. Houses had cesspools in their cellars. The smell was terrible and it was discovered that cholera came from water and wasn’t airborne. Dr. John Snow and the Rev. Henry Whitehead drew a map of Soho showing the buildings where there were significant numbers of cases of cholera and linked this outbreak to a particular water pump, previously known for its pure water.
There is also a little video of Steven Johnstone talking about this. Well worth a look,
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