This drawing is based on a map showing the distribution of cholera victims in East London in June to July 1866. It was drawn to demonstrate most victims were in the service area for the Old Ford Reservoir of the East London Water company at Bow, confirming a hypothesis of the link between cholera and sewerage contaminated water.
The drawing shows Bazelgettes sewer lines and the reservoir (blue line), the district served by the reservoir (dashed), Regents Canal and River Lea (grey), and the dots represent the location of death by cholera.
I like two things about the cholera map: firstly that a mapping technique is used to prove a medical hypothesis, and secondly the two extremities of scale within the drawing, the micro (bacteria) plotted onto the macro geographical scale.
One can (mis)translate the drawing in this way: the outline of district served by the reservoir creates a geographical cast or cavity, similar to the process of a fossil where the original organism decays to create a cast.
The smaller villages where there is a concentration of deaths, Stratford, Limehouse, Bow, Halleville, I have selected points from which a needle-like crystallization grows over the fossil cavity, and leaks through the outline where some bodies carried the bacteria beyond the boundary of the serviced district.
Most of the villages sound familiar, and the landmarks are still present today little changed. One could almost draw this condition from the past onto a present map of London.
To extrapolate this using the physicist theory on past/present/future (see post on the Future) - if one can draw a condition from the past onto the present, the inverse is also true, one can represent a condition in the future mapped onto the present.
'...the equations work just as well...if the boundary conditions specify a condition in the future... instead of in the past, as long as the fundamental laws of physics are reversible, which most physicists believe they are.'
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