I read most of a book by Steven Johnson, which I will not keep, but was interesting enough. It includes some details about sewers and water works I had not seen in historical context. It's on cholera. My review will not appear under the book for days, maybe not weeks, as I put in a scary word for Amazon review text: internet. If you put an actual web address in your review, they will not publish it.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1594482691/re ... UTF8&psc=1
The author has read a large amount of Victorian text to produce this document. The story flows well enough, you can skip over some sections, such as the overly thorough history of the "miasma" concept, a false theory now debunked with the two main characters investigating.
Problems: The book is titled after maps produced by John Snow, the first epidemiologist, we learn. Yet, there is not a decent reproduction of the map. You can find it all over the internet, but hey, I paid for a book!
The world wide description of cities and their waste and fresh water supply is well summarized in about 10 pages. By 1885 most of it had been sorted out, with cholera mostly wiped out. There were still epidemics and it took well into the 1900s to figure out how to treat cholera. He does not actually describe the attempts, even in Victorian times, very well. He alludes to IV fluids, which is in fact how you treat it now, if you have a hospital. But other methods are used, see WHO and cholera.
He kind of rambles onto modern day problems with epidemics, including H5N1 influenza. For several pages he talks about bacteria and viruses and DNA. No influenza has DNA, it only has RNA. A cartoon of viral replication would have been more useful. If you are interested in other epidemics, try the Oxford Short Introductions book on the topic.
