The Breath of Pestilence: Recent Literature on Pandemics in North America: Home

The COVID pandemic’s arrival in 2020 marked humanity’s most recent intersection with an unfamiliar and potentially lethal pathogen. Across the centuries such events have generated both social upheaval and public health reforms, much of which has been chronicled in a variety of popular and professional literature in fields as diverse as medicine, history, politics, poetry, and religion. The raised awareness of the possibility of global infection has also occasioned demand for information on both recent and historical incidents of disease and society’s responses to them. The books discussed in this essay cover both specific events and pandemic as a social phenomenon, and were all published in the late-20th and early-21st centuries.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a pandemic as an “epidemic over a very large area affecting a large proportion of a population.” Using this definition, one can identify pandemic events dating back to Roman times and earlier, although the description of individual symptoms often makes precise etiology difficult. Works dealing with pandemics can be divided into two types: those that focus on individual diseases, their occurrences, and evolving treatments, and those that discuss pandemics as a class of health issues that have bearing on society in general.

In December 2023 a search of the WORLDCAT database using the terms “history” and “pandemic” and filtering for “United States” revealed that the number of nonjuvenile and nonfiction titles (in English) on pandemics has risen sharply over the last four decades—from 20 titles in the period from 1990 to 2000 to 784 in the period from 2020 to 2023, i.e., since the outbreak of COVID. This explosion of material poses a considerable challenge for librarians seeking to shape balanced coverage of this rapidly growing and evolving literature.

Robert Ridinger is a subject specialist in the social sciences at Northern Illinois University.