GhostMap

• Average overall. Almost bailed. Good descriptions of the Miasma theory and how hard it is to overturn and entrenched scientific theory.
• Are bones are the result of recycling waste products (calcium) from cells.
• People thought the bad smells of London were killing them, in a sense they were because they distracted them from the true cause and lead to decisions that ended up making matters far worse.

Used To Believe

• Multicultural life only has two options for staying alive: breathing or converting sunlight. Bacteria can survive in a bunch of different ways.
• The explosion of tea drinking in the late 1700s was from the bacteria's point of view, a microbial holocaust.
• At the same time John Snow was building a case for cholera being a waterborne agent, the London public health department was building an elaborate scheme that would deliver the cholera bacteria directly into the mouths of Londoners. The first defining act of a modern, centralized public-health authority was to poison an entire urban population.
• Londoners were celebrating the ever-increasing tonnage of human excrement being flushed into the water supply. This madness comes from being under the spell of a wrong theory. If all smell was disease, if London's health crisis was attributable to contaminated air, then any effort to rid the houses and streets of miasmatic vapors was worth the cost, even if it meant turning the Thames into a river of sewage.
• Whenever smart people cling to a theory despite significant evidence to the contrary, something interesting is going on. For miasma it was a confluence of influences: social prejudice, failures of imagination, some involve the basic wiring of the human brain. Tradition, evolutionary history of disgust, technological limitation in microscopy were all factors.
• One line summary of the history book of recent Homo sapiens: We became city dwellers.
• Cities have a much smaller environmental footprint than other forms of human settlement. Environmentalists are learning something that capitalists learned a few centuries ago: there are efficiencies to urban living that outweigh all the annoyances.