Disease mapping
By: Andrew LakoffHave been reading Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map . It is a popular history of John Snow’s effort to prove the waterborn theory of cholera by mapping the spatial trajectory of an 1854 outbreak in relation to a specific water pump in London. The story is fascinating in multiple ways, but one thing to note from our vantage is the way that “population security” was initially articulated in relation to urgent problems of collective life. Snow’s knowledge is archival, and it is integrally related to the development of urban infrastructures: water and sewer systems for London’s burgeoning population. The mapping process - once it had finally convinced skeptics to abandon miasma theories of contagion - led to an understanding of the need to keep human waste away from water supplies, and to the construction of the first modern sewer system, a daunting engineering challenge. It would be interesting to compare the British cholera story to the French one told in French Modern, especially in relation to the question of “the social” as an object of knowledge and intervention.
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January 3rd, 2007 at 9:30 am
random connection: this looks like a good collection of essays
Filth : dirt, disgust, and modern life
William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson, editors.
Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, c2005.
Contents: Good and intimate filth / Christopher Hamlin — The new
historicism and the psychopathology of everyday modern
life / David Trotter — Sewage treatments : vertical
space and waste in nineteenth-century Paris and London /
David L. Pike — Medical mapping : the Thames, the body,
and our mutual friend / Pamela K. Gilbert — Confronting
sensory crisis in the great stinks of London and Paris /
David S. Barnes — Victorian dust traps / Eileen Cleere
– “Dirty pleasure” : trilby’s filth / Joseph Bristow —
Merdre! performing filth in the bourgeois public sphere
/ Neil Blackadder — Foreign matter : imperial filth /
Joseph W. Childers — The dustbins of history: waste
management in late-Victorian utopias / Natalka Freeland
— The Indian subject of colonial hygiene / William
Kupinse — Abject academy / Benjamin Lazier.
January 5th, 2007 at 1:40 am
Steven Shapin published an interesting review of the “Ghost Map” book a few weeks ago in the New Yorker.
January 5th, 2007 at 10:40 am
The full text of that review is here