The present decade has seen a shift in the literature from detailed recounting of past pandemics affecting North America to a consideration of the variety of ways such events transform existing social structures and result in strong emotional and psychological reactions. This body of literature focuses on various specific questions, including the social implications of pandemics, the determinative impact of the diseases on national history, and preventative techniques and problems of managing outbreaks within urban areas.
Among the events brought on by the arrival of European explorers in the Western hemisphere in the fifteenth century was the widespread decimation of resident Native populations by pathogens, carried by explorers. to which Native populations had no resistance. This worked both ways, as explorers returned to Europe bearing new diseases they had acquired in the so-called New World. In Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650, Noble David Cook provides an account of this early series of devastating pandemics. The first section of his book examines the extinction of the Indigenous Taino peoples of the Caribbean from first contact by Columbus in 1492 to the initial outbreak of smallpox in 1518. Cook then discusses deaths of rulers and large numbers of their subjects in the civilizations and complex cultures of Mexico and Central and South America from such diseases as influenza and measles, imported between the 1540s and 1600, as the result of expeditions of exploration and conquest. In the final chapter of his book Cook discusses the range of smallpox, typhus, and yellow fever, then presents data on localized occurrences of disease in Mesoamerica, the Upper Amazon Basin, coastal Brazil, and finally North America. In The Burdens of Disease: Epidemics and Human Response in Western History (now in its second edition), J. N. Hays does not consider individual pandemics individually but instead evaluates the influence of varied cultural constructs of disease, the ways health issues are perceived, and the political and social responses they generate. He looks at the dynamic inequality between populations in poverty and elite classes: pandemic diseases impact the poor more severely, and elites believed the ways the poor lived contributed to the causes and spread of pathogens. In his second book, Epidemics and Pandemics: Their Impacts on Human History, Hays expands the geographic and chronological limits used in The Burdens of Disease to the entire globe and a period beginning with the appearance of an epidemic in Athens in 430 BCE. He presents detailed data on fifty epidemic and pandemic disease outbreaks, giving details of place and date of occurrence, background information and historical significance, contemporaneous explanations for the event, and issues as yet not clear. Among the events Hays notes are outbreaks in the sixteenth century, smallpox in Boston in 1721, yellow fever in Philadelphia in 1793 (followed in 1853 by another outbreak in New Orleans), polio in 1916 and 1945–55, the Spanish flu of 1918–19, and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s.
Medical historian Mark Honigsbaum’s The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris begins with the Spanish flu in 1918, then reports on a plague outbreak in Los Angeles in 1924, the parrot fever (psittacocis) pandemic of 1929–30, legionnaires’ disease in 1976 Philadelphia, and more recent diseases such as AIDS (in both Africa and the United States), SARS, Ebola, and Zika. Frank Snowden’s Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present grew out of an undergraduate course Snowden initiated at Yale on emerging diseases, after observing that the curriculum in place focused chiefly on the public health and scientific aspects of these events. He intended the new course to place such diseases within a broader context by ad-dressing their effects on the arts, politics, religion, modern medical care, and the forces driving social change. Snowden begins with ancient Greek medicine and the notion that illness was caused by various humors, and then discusses plague, smallpox, yellow fever, typhus, tuberculosis, malaria, polio, SARS, Ebola, and HIV. He devotes chapters to the influence of the Paris School of Medicine (at the turn of the nineteenth century) in the understanding of disease, the sanitary movement in the nineteenth century, and the evolution of germ theory.4
Other titles of note include Howard Markel’s When Germs Travel: Six Major Epidemics That Have Invaded America and the Fears They Have Unleashed, Polly Price’s Plagues in the Nation: How Epidemics Shaped America, and Ian Tizard and Jeffrey Musser’s Great American Diseases: Their Effects on the Course of North American History.
Two very recent titles address the social and medical management of a pandemic disease. Inoculating Cities: Case Studies of Urban Pandemic Preparedness, edited by Rebecca Katz and Matthew Boyce, arose from the fact that the historical record of diseases frequently focuses on their disruptive effects on major population centers. Katz and Boyce provide valuable comparative data drawing on examples of preparedness strategies in use outside of the United States. Reports from India, Malawi, Myanmar, Japan, Nigeria, and Australia are included. The essays on the United States examine data from Phoenix, New York City, and the state of Washington; the involvement of the private sector in establishing and maintaining health security; and the use of war-gaming as an analytical tool. Readers will appreciate the editors’ introductory essay, “Cities, Infectious Disease, and the Local Governance of Health Security.”
The second of the two books, Charles Vidich’s Germs at Bay: Politics, Public Health, and American Quarantine, reviews the origins and history of the use of quarantine/isolation as a tactic for coping with epidemics and pandemics from Colonial to contemporary times. Using the city of Boston as his case study (due to its use of maritime and land-based quarantine measures since the eighteenth century), Vidich writes in his introduction that his book “shows how quarantine concepts continue to evolve, reflecting contemporary social and political values and the nuances of exposure unique to each microbial threat.” The role of trade networks as vectors for the spread of infections is examined in Mark Harrison’s Contagion: How Commerce Has Spread Disease. In American Contagions: Epidemics and the Law from Smallpox to COVID-19 John Fabian Witt reviews attempts to regulate disease and the range of problems this poses for law and legislation in the United States.
Given recent history, it is sobering to note that decades before the appearance of COVID a literature on the prospect of unknown diseases impacting a global society had begun to emerge. Published some three decades ago, Laurie Garrett’s The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World out of Balance was the first book to take on this particular subject. A decade later Kurt Link published Understanding New, Resurgent, and Resistant Diseases: How Man and Globalization Create and Spread Illness. Scholars in the discipline of anthropology explored the realm of pandemic disease in Plagues and Epidemics: Infected Spaces Past and Present, edited by Ann Herring and Alan Swedlund. The eighteen essays in this collection investigate topics as varied as how news coverage of epidemics contributes to their public identity, global warming as a factor in the emergence of new infections, and the use of mathematical models to describe pandemics. Case studies of kuru (a prion disease resembling Creutzfeld-Jakob disease), dengue fever, malaria, tuberculosis, avian influenza, and the familiar 1918 Spanish flu (drawing on mortality data from Massachusetts) provide comparative perspective.
The decade leading up to the appearance of COVID witnessed the publication of two works dealing with the origin and transmission of pandemic infections. Stanford biologist and virologist Nathan Wolfe’s The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age considers how a pandemic can originate in a nonhuman species, factors involved in the increasing number of such events, and the question of how to effectively predict them. Journalist David Quammen continued the discussion of cross-species transmission in Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic. Samuel Kline Cohn’s Epidemics: Hate and Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS challenges the accepted view that such events inevitably spawn social hatred, violence against the victims, and blame for the diseases on sources that are sinister and evil. Utilizing a detailed body of primary sources, Cohn reflects on the realities of epidemics and their power to unify a society across class, racial, and ethnic lines in the provision of care. This power is among the most enduring lessons that should be remembered in any evaluation of historical writing on diseases and their impact across the planet.
4. In his preface, Snowden states that his goal is “to encourage discussion among general readers and students with an interest in the history of epidemic diseases and a concern about ... preparedness as a society to meet new microbial challenges.”
