The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic

Johnson reconstructs the 1854 Soho cholera outbreak and the two men — a doctor and a minister — who solved it by mapping the dead. The story of John Snow and the Broad Street pump is usually told as a simple triumph of empiricism over superstition, but Johnson finds the complexity: the resistance, the competing theories, the city that was killing its own inhabitants and blaming bad air.