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Some reading about epidemics of the past

Brian Leiter

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY–COMMENTS NOW OPEN FOR OTHER SUGGESTIONS

Dr. Roger Albin (Michigan) writes:

As you publicized the Snowden podcast and as many of your audience are probably compulsive readers looking for useful and engaging reading material, the following may be of interest:

Kyle Harper’s The Fate of Rome – which deals extensively with the impacts of epidemic disease on the later Roman Empire.

JR MacNeill’s Mosquito Empire – disease impacts in the history of the Western Hemisphere.

Elizabeth Fenn’s Pox Americana – on the Smallpox epidemic roughly coincident with the American Revolution and its considerable consequences.

Charles Mann’s more popular books on the impacts of the European invasion of the Western Hemisphere contain a lot of relevant material on one of the most consequential processes in modern history. 

As Harper makes abundantly clear in his fine book, epidemic disease often interacted with climate fluctuations.  Two excellent books that deal with the impacts of climate fluctuations and epidemic disease:

Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis – a comprehensive overview of the misnamed Little Ice Age centered on the 17th century. 

John Brooke’s Climate Change and the Course of Global History – a remarkably ambitious overview. 

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15 responses to “Some reading about epidemics of the past”

  1. David Ozonoff

    Classic accounts about US epidemics past:

    1. John Barry, The Great Influenza (very readable, recent account of 1918 Flu; find out about another President [Woodrow Wilson] making a mess out of pandemic response as bad as the current one );
    2. Charles Rosenberg, The Cholera Years (pathbreaking social history using cholera pandemics as a lens to view mid-nineteenth century social relations);
    3. John Duffy, Epidemics in Colonial America (old school standard public heath history, but still useful for perspective)

    Reply
  2. Dean C. Rowan

    Not useful, but very likely engaging, Daniel DeFoe's A Journal of the Plague Year. (I haven't read it.)

    The Diary of Samuel Pepys: https://www.pepysdiary.com/search/?q=plague — "So home, and put up several things to carry to Woolwich, and upon serious thoughts I am advised by W. Griffin to let my money and plate rest there, as being as safe as any place, nobody imagining that people would leave money in their houses now, when all their families are gone. So for the present that being my opinion, I did leave them there still. But, Lord! to see the trouble that it puts a man to, to keep safe what with pain a man hath been getting together, and there is good reason for it." Pepys reads the weekly mortality bill of statistics, which reports 500 fewer deaths in the most recent week than the one before.

    Reply
  3. Roger Albin

    Barry's book is definitely very readable. His account of the outbreak in Philadelphia is graphic and pertinent. For those interested in the 1918 pandemic, I recommend supplementing Barry's book with the older work by the late, great Alfred Crosby.

    Reply
  4. Roger Albin

    Brian mentioned Frank Snowden's work. The last chapter of his book on epidemics is well worth reading. Among other things, it's a good summary of Federal efforts to develop pandemic preparedness. Essentially all the problems we're experiencing now were identified previously as potential major obstacles to effective responses, in some cases, more than 2 decades ago.

    Reply
  5. Steve Sverdlik

    The PBS American Experience series had a good documentary called Influenza 1918. Alfred Crosby was a consultant.

    Supporters of their PBS station can see it for free. It's also available on Amazon and Netflix.

    Reply
  6. Shane

    I'll add a few to this list. Not all on epidemics strictly, but useful.

    Justinian's Flea by William Rosen (An account of the 6th century Yersinia pestis pandemic in the Byzantine Empire)

    Plagues and Peoples by William H. McNeil (A digestible telling of how communicable disease has shaped human history)

    Spillover by Daniel Quammen (On zoonosis and pandemics)

    Seven Modern Plagues by veterinarian Mark Walters (on how deforestation, climate change, and population growth are fueling modern epidemics)

    Rabid by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy (a history of rabies and really useful for understanding the mythology of infectious disease)

    On Immunity by Eula Biss (A great cultural history of vaccination)

    Reply
  7. John Tilley

    Fascinating reading:

    Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic – and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World (2006).

    Stephan Talty, The Illustrious Dead: The Terrifying Story of How Typhus Killed Napoleon's Greatest Army (2009).

    Reply
  8. Steve Sverdlik

    Just to be clear: the recent, authoritative work by medical historian Frank Snowden of Yale is, Epidemics and Society.

    He's interviewed on the podcast mentioned above:

    https://think.kera.org/2019/12/17/the-epidemics-that-changed-the-world/

    Reply
  9. Paul

    Snowden’s book Epidemics and Society is based on an undergraduate course he gave at Yale. Lecture recordings and transcripts from the spring 2010 iteration are available here:

    https://oyc.yale.edu/history/hist-234

    The syllabus lists the following texts:

    Brandt, Allan. No Magic Bullet. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.

    Barnes, David. The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

    Chase, Marilyn. The Barbary Plague. New York: Random House, 2004.

    Defoe, Daniel. Journal of the Plague Year. New York: Penguin, 2003.

    Fenn, Elizabeth. Pox Americana. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001.

    Snow, John. Snow on Cholera, New York: The Commonwealth Fund: Oxford University Press, 1936.

    Snowden, Frank. The Conquest of Malaria. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006.

    Snowden, Frank. “Emerging and Re-emerging Diseases: A Historical Perspective,” Immunological Reviews. Vol. 225, Issue 1, pages 9-26, October 2008.

    Snowden, Frank. Naples in the Time of Cholera. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

    Verghese, Abraham. My Own Country. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.

    Reply
  10. David Ozonoff

    Suggestions for fictional epidemics?

    Defoe, Journal of the Plague Year [mentioned a couple of times above, but NB: this was fiction, not a true account]
    Camus, The Plague
    Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith

    I'm (confidently) guessing that readers better read than I will have other suggestions.

    Reply
  11. Steve Sverdlik

    There's an overview of fictional plagues by the Harvard historian Jill Lepore in the March 30, 2020 issue of the New Yorker ("Don't Come any Closer").

    She mentions the following:

    Oedipus
    The setting of Bocaccio's Decameron (the Black Death in Florence)
    Mary Shelley, The Last Man
    Edgar Allan Poe, The Masque of the Red Death
    Jack London, The Scarlet Plague.

    She doesn't mention Katherine Anne Porter's, Pale Horse, Pale Rider.

    This is said to be such a powerful depiction of an episode of the 1918 influenza epidemic that Alfred Crosby dedicated his book about it to Porter.

    Also worth mentioning is Thucydides' (non-fictional) account of the plague in Athens in 430 BC. Book II of his History of the Peloponnesian War.

    Reply
  12. Steve Sverdlik

    Alessandro Manzoni, The Betrothed
    Thomas Mann, Death in Venice
    Mann,The Magic Mountain (not an epidemic, but tuberculosis is still deadly.)

    Tuberculosis plays a role in works of 19th century literature, and opera, but it wasn't known until the 1880's that it is contagious.

    Reply
  13. Bill Edmundson

    Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice, and History

    Reply
  14. Steve Sverdlik

    Tony Kushner, Angels in America.

    Reply
  15. Steve Sverdlik

    A new essay by Nobelist Orhan Pamuk on the literature of pandemics:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-orhan-pamuk.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

    —–
    KEYWORDS:
    Primary Blog

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