The book follows two men who in different ways were instrumental in uncovering the true source of the epidemic, and who ended up becoming friends and working together. Each chapter of the nine-chapter book, excluding the conclusion and the epilogue, is subtitled with a day of the week. The book unfolds over the course of a week in September 1854, when the outbreak was at its height. The cesspool in turn contaminated the nearby Broad Street well, infecting many of the citizens who drank from it. The first cholera victim in the neighborhood was an infant-known in the book as baby Lewis-whose soiled diaper was flung into the cesspool at the foot of the Lewis household. The outbreak was concentrated in the Golden Square neighborhood of Soho and claimed hundreds of lives over the span of a week. Human genetic change is several orders of magnitude slower we have to go through a whole fifteen-year process of maturation before we can even think about passing our genes to a new generation.The immediate subject of The Ghost Map is the cholera outbreak that took place in London in 1854. Each new generation opens up new possibilities for genetic innovation, either by new combinations of existing genes or by random mutations.
For one, bacterial life cycles are incredibly fast: a single bacterium can produce a million offspring in a matter of hours.
Bacteria and viruses evolve at much faster rates than humans do, for several reasons.
This is an evolutionary principle that has long been observed in populations of disease-spreading microbes. It also greatly increased the lethality of the bacteria. cholerae circulating through the small intestines of mankind. “The contamination of drinking water in dense urban settlements did not merely affect the number of V.
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