Epidemics and Society

Reviewed by: Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present by Frank M. Snowden J. R. McNeill Frank M. Snowden. Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present. Open Yale Courses Series. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2019. xiii + 582 pp. Ill. $35.00 (978-0-300-19221-6). Frank Snowden completed this book before the COVID-19 pandemic struck. But like many historians of disease, he saw something like this coming. He includes about twenty pages (454–74) on emerging infectious diseases and SARS especially that make it all the harder to forgive those in power who, early in 2020, failed to recognize what SARS-CoV-2 might bring, and sat by while infection spread silently. Few books can be more timely than this one. It is not so much an argument-driven book as a survey, the fruit of an undergraduate lecture course. He offers a “hypothesis” (p. 2) “that epidemics are not an esoteric subfield for the interested specialist but instead are a major part of the ‘big picture’ of historical change and development.” For readers of this journal, that may seem more like an obvious truism than a hypothesis. For most undergraduates, it is likely a useful expansion of their sense of history. Snowden’s geographical scope is mainly the Western world. Asia, Africa, and Latin America come in for brief mentions, most extensively in a chapter on yellow fever and the Haitian Revolution and in discussions of the third plague pandemic. His chronological scope is larger than his subtitle suggests, as early chapters treat the Justinianic plague, Hippocratic medicine, and early humoral theory. Thematically, the book concentrates on the intellectual, cultural, and public health contexts of epidemics, with frequent attention to the interplay of war and disease. It is unusual in its plentiful references to fiction and poetry, of which Snowden displays—gracefully—an estimable knowledge. Of its twenty-two chapters, four deal with medical ideas, four with plague, two with smallpox, two with tuberculosis, two with HIV/AIDS, two with emerging infections (mainly SARS and Ebola), and one each with cholera, polio, malaria, yellow fever, and typhus. Often these chapters zero in on one episode, such as typhus in Napoleon’s army on its retreat from Russia in 1812, or malaria and its elimination from Sardinia. The main disappointment (for me) in his choices of what to include and what to leave out is the extremely thin treatment of the disease experience of the Americas in the wake of Columbus. Snowden offers two pages (pp. 102–4), mostly on Hispaniola, before shunting this topic off stage, saying the stories of disease among the indigenous peoples of the Americas has already been well told elsewhere. That is true; but it is equally true of the story of Napoleon in Russia or of Pasteur, Koch, and Lister, and many other topics dealt with at length in his book. The research behind the work is mainly published secondary sources, with a sprinkling of newspaper accounts. There is one archival citation, to a speech [End Page 593] given by South Africa’s President Botha, and one to the Sabin archives in Cincinnati. Snowden has also used— extensively—books published in earlier centuries, contemporary to the events he describes. With few exceptions, he has not used the paleopathology work of geneticists, which, in his defense, is of little use for Snowden’s emphasis on cultural and public health responses to epidemics. But occasionally this results in accounts of epidemics at odds with today’s prevailing understandings. He has the Justinianic plague originating in Africa (pp. 30 and 35), whereas specialists in recent years, relying on aDNA work, prefer a Central Asian origin. The book’s origin in a lecture course shows up in the citation practices, which are inconsistent. The early chapters are thinly documented, all with fewer than ten citations. Later chapters include about twenty or thirty references. Sometimes, as on pp. 136–37, lengthy quotations lack any citation. This will frustrate scholars, but perhaps not general readers. A substantial bibliography appears at the end. The writing is always clear, at times elegant and at times repetitive. The organization is broadly chronological, but

Ancient history · Argument (complex analysis) · Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) · Disease · Economic history · Haven · Infectious disease (medical specialty) · Latin Americans · Pandemic · Plague (disease) · Political science · Power (physics) · Classics · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · History · History of Science and Medicine · Law · Medicine · Yersinia bacterium, plague, ectoparasites research