The Ghost Map

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The river of intellectual progress is not defined purely by the steady flow of good ideas begetting better oens; it follows the topography that has been carved out for it by external factors. Sometimes, that topography throws up so many barriers that the river backs up for while. Such was the case miasma in the mid-nineteenth century.

And so, Snow's immunity to the miasma theory was as overdetermined as the theory itself. Partly it was an accident of professional interest: partly it was a reflection of his social consciousness: partly it was his consilient, polymath way of making sense of the world. He was brilliant, no doubt, but one needed to look to William Farr to see how easily brilliant minds could be drawn int error by orthodoxy and prejudice. Like all those ill-fated souls dying on Broad Street, Snow's insight lay at the intersection point of a series of social and historical vectors. However brillient Snow was, he would never have proved his theory - and might well have failed to concoct it in the first place - without the population densities of industrial London, or Farr's numerical rigor, or his own working-class upbringing. This is how great intellectual breakthroughs usually happen in practice. It is rarley the isolated genius having a eureka moment alone in the lab. Nor is it merely a question of building on precedent, of stand on the shoulders of giants, in Newton's famous phrase. Great breakthroughs are closer to what happens in a flood plain: a dozen seperate tributaries converge, and the rising waters lift the genius high enough that he or she ca see around the conceptual obstruction of the age.

Was alles zusammen kommen muss, um grosse intellektuelle Durchbrueche zu ermoeglichen. Nicht nur der Intellekt der Menschen die sich vorher durch den Morast gegraben haben, oder der Hirnschmalz desjenigen der die grosse Einsicht hatte. Auch gesellschaftliche, wirtschaftliche und persoenliche Faktoren spielen mit rein.

To build a case for waterborne cholera, the mind had to travel across scales of human experience, from the impossibly small - the invisible kingdom of microbes - to the anatomy of the digestive tract, to the routine daily patterns of drinking wells or paying the water-company bills, all the way up to the grand cycles of life and death recorded in the Weekly Returns

Cholera praesentiert sich nicht nur in Form des Bakteriums. Sie ist das Bakterium plus die Lebenssituation der Menschen, die hygienische Situation an sich, das Abwassersystem, die Gewohnheiten der Menschen, ihre Denkweisen und ihr Verhalten. Wir und die Umgebung die wir geschaffe haben sind Teil der Krankheit.

[...] So often, what is lacking in many of these explanations and prescriptions is some measure of humility, some sense that the theory beeing put forward is still unproven.

Ein Corona-Deja-Vu

[...] An investigator looking for holes in the theory could find them everywhere, even in the writings of the miasmatists themselves.

Woran liegt das? Ego? Weil mein Selbstwertgefuehl an der Theorie haengt? Weil ich schlicht dafuer bezahlt werde?

The search for unpoluted drinking water is as old as civilization itself. As soon as there were mass human settlements, waterborne diseases like dysentery became a crucial population bottleneck. For much of human history, the solution to this chronic public-health issue was not purifying the water supply. The solution was to drink alcohol. [...] Whatever healht risks where posed bu beer (and later wine) in the early days of agrarian settlement where more than offset by alcohol's antibacterial properties.

Und so kam es, dass Mama Natur einschritt. Wenn der Mensch seinen Lebensstil nicht nach benoetigten Resource einzurichten weiss, ermoeglicht ihm die Evolution stattdessen vorhandene Resourcen zu nutzen.

Over Generations, the gene pool of the first farmers became increasingly dominated by individuals who could dring beer on a regular basis. Most of the world's population today is made up of descendants ot those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance for alcohol.

While the mechanism of life is suddenly arrested, the body emptied by a few rapid gushes of its serum, and reduced to a damp, dead ... mass, the mind within remains untouched and clear, - shining strangley through the glazed eyes, with light unquenched and vivid, - a spirit, looking out in terror from a corpse

Wunderschoen geschrieben!!!!