Reviewer: Alain Touwaide, PhD (Ronin Institute)
Description: The recent COVID-19 pandemic has generated a wave of new stories of epidemics and pandemics through history, each with a specific, unique, and interesting goal. This book takes a special approach: investigating anthropogenic factors in the making of epidemics, pandemics, and similar major human health phenomena through the macro-analysis of a dozen major killers, along with a study of reactions from medicine and society. It is a complex history of intertwined actions and reactions that illustrates the role humans play in both triggering and mastering major nosological processes.
Purpose: The book's purpose is explicitly stated "to bring awareness of the consequences of human activity on global health" and "to contribute to informed decisions when choices need to be made for the health of our children and the future of the human race." By considering the past as a laboratory to observe processes and infer laws/principles, we can use "applied history" to inform pandemic decision-making in the future.
Audience: This book is highly analytical, cross-disciplinary, and complex in nature, dissecting pandemics from a combination of many viewpoints. The abundant literature that concludes each chapter adds to the depth of the analysis by providing not only data, but also further material to expand and deepen the analysis. As such, this is certainly a university and research book with a broad, yet specialized audience, from PhD candidates in the history of medicine to epidemiologists and policymakers. Regardless, the book is intended for those at an advanced level.
Features: The book is comprised of 15 chapters that analyze specific epidemics and pandemics and, in parallel, examine the responses by society. It contains careful analyses of many major episodes, such as the so-called Justinian Plague, the Black Death, syphilis, the Spanish Flu, and, more recently, HIV/AIDS and different forms of the coronavirus. The analysis is not simply descriptive, but considers all factors, not only strictly biomedical, but also societal, cultural, and religious. These analyses precede the other chapters, which focus on the deep processes in history, including differences in epidemiology, deforestation, climate change, zoonosis, and even bioterrorism. At the intersection of these two major approaches, some chapters aim to highlight actions taken to mitigate (if possible) pandemics and epidemics. Thus, this book provides a highly intertwined history that combines not only different historical approaches, but also many factors that might have concurrently triggered major epidemiological processes. Most of these factors are accounted for by human behaviors and acts which led to epidemics and pandemics, with knowledge (or not) of the possibility of these outbreaks.
Assessment: In recent years, many books have focused on epidemics, pandemics, and other major epidemiological processes that resulted from human actions. None of these recent contributions went as far as this book in surgically peeling the history of epidemics and pandemics to expose the human triggering factors, with their multiplicity and diversity. This is a properly forensic analysis of history, fundamentally dynamic in nature, that transcends obvious medical facts and gets to the bottom of the issue by capturing currents in the depth of history and human behaviors that, knowingly or not, contributed to the development of major health issues affecting populations.