A very timely book that makes for not just a relevant comparison to our current moment, but also simply fascinating reading by a renowned epidemiologist.
TEN PLAGUES:
An Untold Story of Human Pandemics and Why They Still Plague Us
by Dr. John Froude & Bob Berman
Benbella, January 2021
In 1918, in just under a year, 50 million people worldwide died from influenza. In the twentieth century alone, 400 million people died from smallpox, tuberculosis and AIDS. That’s sixteen times more than all the soldiers killed in every human war, combined. Pandemics historically occur at the rate of two new ones per century. And often times, the plagues we may have not yet seen will arise as AIDS did, with little or no warning. These catastrophes deserve serious attention. This book re-examines these global cataclysms in a new way, with DNA research and with technologies which allow us to consider the importance of plagues in human history, their effects, why we have them, how they arise, and how they have been misunderstood. It also explores our intimate relationship with the primary cause of plagues, the tiny creatures that kill us by the millions. TEN PLAGUES covers the origins, histories, and cultural impacts of yellow fever, smallpox, syphilis, bubonic plague, influenza, typhus, cholera, malaria, tuberculosis, AIDS, and more. The story of each is interspersed with chapters that explore the science and the quirky, often astonishing facts behind these universal threats. The authors started writing before the onset of COVID-19, but the incredible timing makes this book a significant resource for readers trying to learn not just how things got this way, but also what history might be able to tell us about what the future holds.
John Froude, MD FRCP is board certified not just as a Doctor of Internal medicine but also as an expert in Infectious Diseases. He has taught lectures on epidemiology and medicine as an Assistant Professor at NYU and continues practicing in upstate New York.
Bob Berman is the bestselling author of several significant works like Earth-Shattering: Violent Supernovas, Galactic Explosions, Biological Mayhem, Nuclear Meltdowns, and Other Hazards to Live in Our Universe. He is also known for having co-written (with Robert Lanza) Biocentrism, Beyond Biocentrism, and The Grand Biocentric Design, among other published works.
In illness, Bauer provides a surprising new lens through which to consider all of human history—she argues that bodily sickness and our conception of it has shaped our culture, our philosophies, and our religions, and has directly and indirectly affected how we view others, how we view ourselves, and how we fashion our world. She argues that sickness is the great mirror that reflects back our most urgent and eternal questions: Why does calamity descend without warning? How can we explain it? And how do we fight back? Told in a propulsive narrative style that brings sweeping history to life through intimate individual stories—the feverish Mesopotamian sufferer; the plague victim who dies alone, the last in his village; the seventeenth-century teenager racked by smallpox; the Congolese grandmother watching her family die of Ebola—Bauer takes readers on a journey from humans’ earliest days when sickness was an unsolvable mystery, evidence that humans were powerless to the unseen forces of gods, to more modern times and the birth of germ theory, when secularism grew alongside our fear of contamination. A multidisciplinary human history like no other, BONES, BLOOD, BREATH is a big think book that tells a large-scale, vivid, chronological story, stretching around the world from ancient times until the present—it will change the way we understand who we are.