Plagued

From the Black Death to Covid-19, pandemics have shaped and reshaped human society. Science and history can give us insight into two urgent questions: Why do they persist? And how can we survive them? Pandemics have been with us since Homo sapiens appeared on earth nearly 300,000 years ago. Forty percent of our genes are made of DNA from viruses. Yet we still remain vulnerable. Today, we are engulfed by a new pandemic: SARS-CoV-2 or the coronavirus that originated in China and, within four months, had spread to every country in the world. Thanks to advances in molecular biology and new tools with which to probe them, we are also in the midst of a golden age of understanding when it comes to our tiniest enemies. DNA technology is rewriting history, resolving disputes that have persisted for decades—and giving us crucial insights that may safeguard our future. Infectious Disease Specialist Dr. John Froude has worked on four continents over nearly 50 years, treating sufferers of plagues that arose over a century ago and never left us (like malaria and cholera) and battling new threats (like AIDS and Covid-19) as they emerge. In Plagued, he offers a gripping and timely account of the pandemics that have driven our evolution and shaped our history. Plagued tells the stories of yellow fever, smallpox, syphilis, the bubonic plague, influenza, typhus, cholera, malaria, tuberculosis, AIDS, and Covid-19. Blending science and narrative, Froude explores not only the unstoppable march of pestilence and its effects, but our intimate relationship with bacteria and viruses. He also explores the complex wonder that is human immunity, which itself is the consequence of an arms race between microbes and our animal ancestors that started 3.5 billion years ago. Along the way, we meet the dogged geniuses who have brought us back from the brink and see what it might take to do it again. Plagues arise without warning. But as we watch the current cataclysm unfold in real time, we have a unique opportunity to forge a path ahead that avoids both denial and panic. This timely book illustrates how lessons from the past, both distant and recent, may be the key to understanding why pandemics continue to plague us, and what can be done to stop them.

Chronicles the history and mystery of several centuries of plague including bioweapons programs initiated by the former Soviet Union.

Author Lizabeth Hardman gives readers a compelling look into the history of the plague. Readers will learn about the scourge of mankind and its chaos over ancient times. They will learn about the third pandemic, and where the plague is in the world now. Readers will evaluate the impact it could have on the future. Bright images, illustrations, diagrams, and charts provide excellent concise details, perfect for report writing and researching.

The Power of Plagues presents a rogues' gallery of epidemic- causing microorganisms placed in the context of world history. Author Irwin W. Sherman introduces the microbes that caused these epidemics and the people who sought (and still seek) to understand how diseases and epidemics are managed. What makes this book especially fascinating are the many threads that Sherman weaves together as he explains how plagues past and present have shaped the outcome of wars and altered the course of medicine, religion, education, feudalism, and science. Cholera gave birth to the field of epidemiology. The bubonic plague epidemic that began in 1346 led to the formation of universities in cities far from the major centers of learning (and hot spots of the Black Death) at that time. And the Anopheles mosquito and malaria aided General George Washington during the American Revolution. Sadly, when microbes have inflicted death and suffering, people have sometimes responded by invoking discrimination, scapegoating, and quarantine, often unfairly, against races or classes of people presumed to be the cause of the epidemic. Pathogens are not the only stars of this book. Many scientists and physicians who toiled to understand, treat, and prevent these plagues are also featured. Sherman tells engaging tales of the development of vaccines, anesthesia, antiseptics, and antibiotics. This arsenal has dramatically reduced the suffering and death caused by infectious diseases, but these plague protectors are imperfect, due to their side effects or attenuation and because microbes almost invariably develop resistance to antimicrobial drugs. The Power of Plagues provides a sobering reminder that plagues are not a thing of the past. Along with the persistence of tuberculosis, malaria, river blindness, and AIDS, emerging and remerging epidemics continue to confound global and national public health efforts. West Nile virus, Lyme disease, and Ebola and Zika viruses are just some of the newest rogues to plague humans. The argument that civilization has been shaped to a significant degree by the power of plagues is compelling, and The Power of Plagues makes the case in an engaging and informative way that will be satisfying to scientists and non-scientists alike.

The outbreak of the plague in 1347, commonly referred to as the Black Death, was the source of numerous socio-economic changes in the later Middle Ages. Numerous studies have traced the progress and effects of the disease in countries such as Germany, England, France, and Spain. Such a study concerning Spain has been conspicuously absent until now. The present investigation is among the first to bring together information that documents the pernicious behavior of the disease in Spain and to demonstrate how it changed the societies it afflicted. Studying the medical and imaginative texts of medieval Spain, reveals that the disease did, in fact, help change the perceived role of the medical practitioner, the idea of public health, and the portrayal of death and dying.

How epidemic photography during a global pandemic of bubonic plague contributed to the development of modern epidemiology and our concept of the “pandemic.” In Visual Plague, Christos Lynteris examines the emergence of epidemic photography during the third plague pandemic (1894–1959), a global pandemic of bubonic plague that led to over twelve million deaths. Unlike medical photography, epidemic photography was not exclusively, or even primarily, concerned with exposing the patient’s body or medical examinations and operations. Instead, it played a key role in reconceptualizing infectious diseases by visualizing the “pandemic” as a new concept and structure of experience—one that frames and responds to the smallest local outbreak of an infectious disease as an event of global importance and consequence. As the third plague pandemic struck more and more countries, the international circulation of plague photographs in the press generated an unprecedented spectacle of imminent global threat. Nothing contributed to this sense of global interconnectedness, anticipation, and fear more than photography. Exploring the impact of epidemic photography at the time of its emergence, Lynteris highlights its entanglement with colonial politics, epistemologies, and aesthetics, as well as with major shifts in epidemiological thinking and public health practice. He explores the characteristics, uses, and impact of epidemic photography and how it differs from the general corpus of medical photography. The new photography was used not simply to visualize or illustrate a pandemic, but to articulate, respond to, and unsettle key questions of epidemiology and epidemic control, as well as to foster the notion of the “pandemic,” which continues to affect our lives today.

This Element examines the emergence of comprehensive plague management systems in early modern France. While the historiography on plague argues that the plague of Provence in the 1720s represented the development of a new and 'modern' form of public health care under the control of the absolutist monarchy, it shows that the key elements in this system were established centuries earlier because of the actions of urban governments. It moves away from taking a medical focus on plague to examine the institutions that managed disease control in early modern France. In doing so, it seeks to provide a wider context of French plague care to better understand the systems used at Provence in the 1720s. It shows that the French developed a polycentric system of plague care which drew on the input of numerous actors combat the disease.

States of Plague examines Albert Camus’s novel as a palimpsest of pandemic life, an uncannily relevant account of the psychology and politics of a public health crisis. As one of the most discussed books of the COVID-19 crisis, Albert Camus’s classic novel The Plague has become a new kind of literary touchstone. Surrounded by terror and uncertainty, often separated from loved ones or unable to travel, readers sought answers within the pages of Camus’s 1947 tale about an Algerian city gripped by an epidemic. Many found in it a story about their own lives—a book to shed light on a global health crisis. In thirteen linked chapters told in alternating voices, Alice Kaplan and Laura Marris hold the past and present of The Plague in conversation, discovering how the novel has reached people in their current moment. Kaplan’s chapters explore the book’s tangled and vivid history, while Marris’s are drawn to the ecology of landscape and language. Through these pages, they find that their sense of Camus evolves under the force of a new reality, alongside the pressures of illness, recovery, concern, and care in their own lives. Along the way, Kaplan and Marris examine how the novel’s original allegory might resonate with a new generation of readers who have experienced a global pandemic. They describe how they learned to contemplate the skies of a plague spring, to examine the body politic and the politics of immunity. Both personal and eloquently written, States of Plague uncovers for us the mysterious way a novel can imagine the world during a crisis and draw back the veil on other possible futures.

The preeminent meditation on plagues and pandemics from the Islamic world, now in English for the first time A Penguin Classic Six hundred years ago, the author of this landmark work of history and religious thought—an esteemed judge, poet, and scholar in Cairo—survived the bubonic plague, which took the lives of three of his children, not to mention tens of millions of others throughout the medieval world. Holding up an eerie mirror to our own time, he reflects on the origins of plagues—from those of the Prophet Muhammad’s era to the Black Death of his own—and what it means that such catastrophes could have been willed by God, while also chronicling the fear, isolation, scapegoating, economic tumult, political failures, and crises of faith that he lived through. But in considering the meaning of suffering and mass death, he also offers a message of radical hope. Weaving together accounts of evil jinn, religious stories, medical manuals, death-count registers, poetry, and the author’s personal anecdotes, Merits of the Plague is a profound reminder that with tragedy comes one of the noblest expressions of our humanity: the practice of compassion, patience, and care for those around us.