A very interesting review in Nature of Frank M. Snowden's new book Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present. The reviewer, Laura Spinney, is herself the author of Pale Rider, the definitive history of the Spanish flu: How pandemics shape social evolution. Excerpt:
When will we learn never to declare the end of anything? Only 50 years ago, two prominent US universities closed their infectious-disease departments, sure that the problem they studied had been solved. Now, cases of measles and mumps are on the rise again in Europe and the United States, new infectious diseases are emerging at an unprecedented rate, and the threat of the next pandemic keeps philanthropist Bill Gates awake at night.
So it’s a shame that to make this point, Epidemics and Society, Frank Snowden’s wide-ranging study on this rolling human reality, repeats the urban myth that in 1969, US surgeon-general William Stewart said, “It is time to close the book on infectious diseases, and declare the war against pestilence won.” Even though Stewart never said this, it’s clear that there was a pervasive, dangerously complacent attitude in the late 1960s.
International public-health authorities were predicting that pathogenic organisms, including the parasite that causes malaria, would be eliminated by the end of the twentieth century. Snowden’s broader thesis is that infectious diseases have shaped social evolution no less powerfully than have wars, revolutions and economic crises.
It’s not a new message, but it bears repeating. Snowden, a historian at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, has assembled a vast amount of evidence, some the fruit of his own research. His global history spans more than a millennium of outbreaks, covering diseases from bubonic plague to smallpox, malaria, the respiratory illness SARS, Ebola and beyond. He rehashes the long history of scapegoating, violence, mass hysteria and religiosity that have accompanied epidemics, but only to speculate on their longer-term social, political and cultural consequences.
When cholera struck Paris in 1832 — in an epidemic that eventually killed nearly 19,000 Parisians — a conspiracy theory spread that the unpopular government under King Louis Philippe was poisoning wells with arsenic. The police and army were barely able to contain the violence that ensued. The institutional memory of those events fuelled dread of the “dangerous classes”: poor people.
That, Snowden argues, might help to explain why the two most egregious examples of class-based repression in the nineteenth century also took place in the French capital. These were the violent crushing of the 1848 revolution and the bloody destruction of the Paris Commune, the revolutionary government that briefly ruled the city 23 years later.
