A HISTORY OF PANDEMICS

What comes to mind when we hear ‘cholera’? Why is cholera still a problem in the world today? The Bay of Bengal has the dubious distinction of housing on its shores the only populations in the world where the disease has been endemic (‘in the people’) for centuries.

- Gagandeep Kang

FOREIGN BODIES
Pandemics,
Vaccines and the
Health of Nations
By Simon Schama SIMON & SCHUSTER

In the 19th and 20th centuries, the movement of sailors, traders and indentured labour carried the infection to Europe, the Americas and Africa. The spread of cholera and the need for international cooperation was recognised by Adrien Proust, father of novelist Marcel Proust, before the causative agent was recognised in the late 19th century. Although Robert Koch is credited with the discovery of the cholera bacillus in 1884, John Snow had already demonstrated the role of contaminated water in transmission, Filippo Pacini had described the swarms of bacteria in intestinal fluids and Proust had mapped the spread of cholera.

These gripping tales of adventure, travel and insights and advancements in public health come at a time when the modern world has just dealt with a pandemic that is now the most studied infectious disease in history. Yet, we often forget that infectious diseases were the most common cause of death in any population anywhere throughout human history until a century ago.

Foreign Bodies brings together stories of diseases that decimate populations and the scientists past and present who studied them in a captivating journey through time, geography and evolving science in a little over 400 pages. Simon Schama’s research into archives in the UK and Israel, and stitching together from secondary sources the tales of these diseases, illustrate the progress made in the understanding of the causes and spread of smallpox, cholera and plague, and the development of inoculation and then vaccines as tools for prevention of disease.