With the coronavirus in the news, pandemics are on the minds of many, but few who haven’t read his book on the subject (or the books he recommends here) could accurately define what a pandemic is. How is a pandemic defined?
The most basic definition is that a pandemic is a very large epidemic that affects a large number of people in a range of time and space. In general, pandemics cross national borders, and modern pandemics often cross ocean borders. That’s how I defined it in my book.
You are reading: Best books on pandemics
please give us a summary of your book pandemics: a very brief introduction.
The book looks at how pandemics develop over time and how societies deal with them, with chapters focusing on hiv, cholera, malaria, smallpox, and tuberculosis. I show how advances in medicine changed our relationship with these diseases.
“pandemics cross national borders”
I make a distinction between acute pandemics, such as cholera, and chronic ones, such as tuberculosis. cholera takes over people’s lives relatively quickly, while tuberculosis is a chronic, long-lasting pandemic; has never left. TB is pandemic in scope, but it is not an acute event that has a clear beginning and end, like a cholera epidemic. When cholera hits a place, like Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, it quickly travels through bodies and societies and then dies out. can define cholera epidemics within a period of time, while tuberculosis and hiv are chronic and ongoing pandemics.
can you convey the scale of a pandemic?
It depends on the disease. the black plague affected europe from 1348 to 51. it probably killed 60% of the european population. the 1919 flu pandemic hit every populated place on the planet; maybe 100 million people over the course of a fall and early winter. and those numbers must be understood relative to the scale of the population, which was a fraction of what it is today.
Most epidemics are contained in time, but what is known as the seventh global cholera pandemic is an outbreak of a strain of cholera that has been circling the globe since the late 1960s. Tuberculosis, an epidemic infectious disease, has been around for so long and has affected so many people for so long that it has probably killed more people than any other pandemic.
You explore the history and persistence of tuberculosis by discovering tuberculosis. I was shocked to learn from his book that a disease I associate with the era of George Washington and Little Women continues to kill more than 2 million a year. tell me about your book and tb.
There are more tuberculosis now than at any other time in world history. I tried to find out why. The book covers the history of the disease since the end of the 19th century. The basic argument of the book is that although tuberculosis has been treatable since the advent of antibiotics, through a variety of human decisions, it has become more difficult than ever to control.
The first section discusses race and medicine, how beliefs about the natural susceptibility of Africans and Native Americans led many medical professionals to explain the persistence of disease based on race. Then I look at the era of World War II, when the BCG vaccine came out and there was widespread hope that it could beat tuberculosis. it was tested on American Indian reservations and implemented throughout the developing world. but many trials were poorly conducted and the results questionable. Evidence mounted that the vaccine was ineffective, while antibiotics proved extremely effective in treating the disease in East Africa.
“Seduced by the idea that antibiotics could be a silver bullet for tuberculosis, the medical community did not take the problem of drug resistance seriously”
The book then covers antibiotics. Seduced by the idea that antibiotics could be a panacea for tuberculosis, the medical community did not take the problem of drug resistance seriously. In Africa, antibiotics were often in short supply and poorly administered, leading to increased drug resistance and harder-to-treat tuberculosis.
In the fourth section of the book, I analyze the global pandemic of TB-HIV coinfection. hiv compromises the immune system, allowing latent tuberculosis to develop into active tuberculosis. I consider the consequences of treating hiv and tuberculosis as separate problems, rather than trying to treat them as a single pandemic.
Going back to the five pandemic books you selected, before going through them one by one, what criteria shaped your choices?
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The books I selected were written by academics, but can be easily digested and enjoyed by the general public. I tried to choose lesser known books such as The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson and The Great Influenza by John Berry.
Let’s start with a book about a period when plagues were endemic. please tell me about the work of the italian historian carlo cippolla on the plague.
Faith, Reason and the Plague is an extraordinary book about a couple of different visits by the plague to a small Tuscan town during the 17th century, during a time when ideas about religion were changing. The response to the plague in Tuscany became a fulcrum for the debate over whether the clergy should continue to command life beyond the doors of the church. the emerging professional class of doctors and administrators explained concepts like contagion and infection that are obvious to us now, but were actually very new at the time.
Cippolla uses court records and other types of primary evidence to explore what happened when the plague hit when science began to question how religion traditionally shaped people’s beliefs. she does it in some 80 pages of wonderful microstory.
So, you are drawing the reader’s attention to how pandemics were instrumental in shaping worldviews, including religious doctrine. can you expand on that point?
In response to the visit of the disease, this new class of medical professionals and administrators urged the population to quarantine themselves to prevent the spread of infection, while the local priests, who were largely in control of the population said: ‘this is an act of God; to protect ourselves from the plague we have to gather for a mass.”
“in the 19th century, the reserves became breeding grounds for infectious diseases such as tuberculosis”
These forces were completely at odds with each other. one is suggesting, based on empirical evidence, that people need to separate. the other says that to stop the plague we must unite and praise god. cippolla shows how these questions of faith and reason, as he says, created huge conflicts.
next, tell me about cleaning up the plains by james daschuk.
this book examines how smallpox changed population dynamics from the first contacts between natives and europeans in canada in the seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth century. daschuk looks at how new hunting mechanisms, as well as the beaver and bison pelt trade, spread disease among natives.
These diseases radically altered social networks and tribal identities over an enormous swath of time and space. in the 19th century, the reserves became breeding grounds for infectious diseases such as tuberculosis. thus, the book shows how early capitalist trade and later kidnapping on reservations led to horrific mortality among native populations, due to infectious diseases brought in with European traders and settlers
Those who study the history of the American hemisphere may be familiar with how pandemics have powerfully shaped history. but many are not. can you please outline the sweeping effects of pandemics on world affairs? for example, in the way they helped clear the plains.
daschuk examines three alien mechanisms that altered Canada today. the introduction of the horse allowed people to travel much faster and farther. the introduction of European diseases such as smallpox were transported faster and farther on horseback. and the introduction of the trade in beaver fur and firearms compounded the two previous factors. the introduction of weapons, germs and horses radically altered the lives of the natives. They played a synergistic role with each other. for example, without the horse and without the motivation of trade, diseases would probably have been isolated rather than becoming pandemics. all three things worked together to cause huge upheavals, including migrations and reductions in the native population.
“Each disease claims its own story,” writes Randall Packard, the author of Your Next Pick. please tell us about the creation of a tropical disease.
the making of a tropical disease looks at the origins of malaria in Africa when people began to settle around water sources and forests began to be cut down. examines the ways in which migration and agriculture fostered the spread of malaria through mosquitoes. It takes us to the end of the 20th century, when the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation launched its sustained effort to eradicate malaria in the developing world.
Diseases such as smallpox were successfully eradicated. Like tuberculosis, malaria is a disease that is impossible to get rid of without widespread environmental manipulation, including the eradication of mosquitoes. And with global warming, there’s a chance malaria could get even worse. This book is by far the best introduction for anyone seeking to understand the importance of malaria in world history.
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Both packard and you should feel wonderful at historians’ conferences to work in a field of history that can save lives. Can you help us understand how epidemiologists and policymakers are using the social history of pandemics to shape the future of public health?
That’s a good question. I don’t know what they do, unfortunately, historical awareness of pandemics is very superficial.
by discovering tuberculosis, I show that there is not much historical awareness in the way we treat tuberculosis. Drug-resistant tuberculosis emerged as a problem in the early 1960s in East Africa, particularly in Kenya. we had the opportunity to address the issue of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, but nothing was done. amnesia about the problem seemed to set in until drug resistance re-emerged as a concern in the 1990s, as if it were a new discovery.
“amnesia about the problem seemed to set in until drug resistance re-emerged as an issue of concern in the 1990s”
In the case of hiv-tb coinfection, it was very clear in the early 1980s that wherever hiv went, tb cases were skyrocketing. In the early 1980s, researchers were very interested in thinking about how to treat the two diseases together. but, for a variety of reasons, that investigation was never fully carried out. Then, in the mid-1950s, coinfection came to the fore, like an epic discovery, even though coinfection had been a problem since the beginning of hiv.
fascinating answer. What About the American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic by historian Nancy Bristow.
This is a fascinating book about a pandemic that, about a hundred years ago, was estimated to have caused perhaps 100 million deaths worldwide, with nearly 700,000 deaths in the US. uu. the scale of death was staggering.
The most interesting part of Bristow’s book is that it clearly shows the ways in which both the medical profession and city officials had no idea what they were up against. something like this had never happened before on that scale. few really understood how viruses worked at the time. Many thought the flu was a bacterial infection, when it was actually a virus. she shows that the country was taken by surprise. people panicked. the pandemic called into question the efficacy of modern medicine. And poignantly, Bristow shows how so many Americans dealt with the tragedy of losing multiple members of their family.
bristow grapples with the mass amnesia that came after the flu epidemic subsided.
bristow tries to investigate why an event that killed a huge portion of the population in a very short period of time and affected all parts of the country left so little imprint on the American imagination and memory. Far fewer Americans died in World War I, yet we consider it a key American event. Why doesn’t the flu pandemic hold a similar place in the national memory? is an interesting question.
For centuries, yellow fever was thought to be the true American epidemic. yellow fever is the subject of epidemic invasions of spiny mariola, which is their final selection.
is another great little book. one that students love when I use it in class and students are always a good barometer for whether a book is palatable.
It’s about how yellow fever affected the United States in the mid-to-late 19th century and the origins of the outbreaks, which can be traced back to Cuba. It raises a lot of interesting questions about what a powerful country can tell a less powerful country to do to control the disease. the other books I selected had different elements of epidemics. this is almost a diplomatic story through the lens of disease.
espinosa examines how pandemics influence economic and political events, a topic of great relevance as the new coronavirus continues to spread from its transmission to humans in china and many are reacting to the pandemic not only as a humanitarian crisis but also as a as a political and economic event.
epidemic invasions shows how pandemics affect trade and diplomatic relations between nations. There are similarities in the relationship between England and India in the 19th century regarding cholera.
Is there anything in who’s or china’s reaction that indicates lessons are being learned from the history of pandemics?
have best practices, which are based on past public health history, but similar mistakes seem to still be made. Sorry to sound so cynical, but the lessons of the past don’t seem to be top of mind for those managing this pandemic.
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