—How two men battled Victorian London’s deadliest cholera outbreak, and what we can learn from their public health efforts—
The Non-fiction Feature
The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic – and How it Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World
Author: Steven Johnson
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Pages: 299 | 2007
It is incumbent on us to…commit ourselves anew to the kinds of public-health systems that developed in the wake of the Broad Street outbreak, both in the developed world and the developing: clean water supplies, sanitary waste-removal and recycling systems, early vaccination programs, disease detection and mapping programs.
Cholera demonstrated that the nineteenth-century world was more connected than ever before…In an age of megacities and jet travel, that connectedness is even more pronounced.
The Fiction Spot
The Plague
by Albert Camus
“A pestilence isn’t a thing made to man’s measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn’t always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they haven’t taken their precautions.”
The Product Spot
Jack Black lotion
I assume you’re washing your hands a lot, because of germs, and maybe COVID, but who’s even worried about that anymore. I assume your hands are cracked, peeling, and overall a bit sad. Jack Black lotion (not associated with the actor) is what lumberjacks use in the dead of winter in a rickety barn after felling trees and lugging wagons. It works well and, thankfully, isn’t too greasy.