The technology has advanced dramatically, but the underlying philosophy remains the same: that there is something profoundly enlightening about seeing these patterns of life and death laid out in cartographic form. The bird's-eye view remains as essential as ti was back in 1854. When the next great epidemic does come, maps will be as crucial as vaccines in our fight agains the disease. But again, the scale of the observation will have broadened considerably: from a neighborhood to an entire planet.

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(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

Miasma was the intellectual equivalent of a contagious disease; it had spread through the intelligentsia with an alarming infection rate.

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(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

What he needed now were aberrations, deviations from the norm. Pockets of life where you would expect death, pockets of death where you would expect life.

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(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

[...] methane and putrescine and cadaverine are the smoke. Microbes are the fire.

[...] They mistook the smoke for the fire.

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(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

"Whilst pestilence slays its thousands, fear slays its tens of thousands".

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(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

Dying of dehydration is, in a sense, an abomination against the very origins of life on earth.

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(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

Once you began emitting rice-water stools, odds were you'd be dead in a matter of hours.

The ghost map [34/299]

(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)

Imagine if every time you experienced a slight upset stomach you knew that there was an entirely reasonable chance you'd be dead in forty-eigh hours.

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(Steven Johnson, 2006, Penguin Books)