Pandemic Literature
Rowan and I reluctantly came to recognize the need for this page. We have fielded so many inquiries from customers about epidemics, pandemics, plagues, and the science behind viral “jumps” between nonhuman to human species that we thought we need to put in one place the references we offer. Fear of the invisible threat extends into the past, whether history or fiction. The present fear looms large. Being human, as Robert Burns pointed out in his poem to the mousie whose life was upset by the plow, means to project the fear into the future, which explains our rich selection of plague-haunted science fiction/horror fiction. Many smart people and good writers have devoted thought and art to considering these fears, and we invite you to calm and measure your own in such good company.
Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines, and the Health of Nations
Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines, and the Health of Nations
A vibrant cultural history investigating pandemics and vaccines, by bestselling author and historian Simon Schama
Cities and countries engulfed by panic and death, desperate for vaccines but fearful of what inoculation may bring. This is what the world has just gone through with Covid-19. But as Simon Schama shows in his epic history of vulnerable humanity caught between the terror of contagion and the ingenuity of science, it has happened before.
Characteristically, Schama’s message is delivered through gripping, page-turning stories set in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: smallpox strikes London; cholera hits Paris; plague comes to India. Threading through the scenes of terror, suffering and hope – in hospitals and prisons, palaces, and slums – are an unforgettable cast of characters: a philosopher-playwright burning up with smallpox in a country chateau; a vaccinating doctor paying house calls in Halifax; a woman doctor in south India driving her inoculator-carriage through the stricken streets as dead monkeys drop from the trees. But we are also in the labs when great, life-saving breakthroughs happen, in Paris, Hong Kong, and Mumbai.
At the heart of it all is an unsung hero: Waldemar Haffkine, a gun-toting Jewish student in Odesa turned microbiologist at the Pasteur Institute, hailed in England as “the saviour of mankind” for vaccinating millions against cholera and bubonic plague in British India while being cold-shouldered by the medical establishment of the Raj. Creator of the world’s first mass production line of vaccines in Mumbai, he is tragically brought down in an act of shocking injustice.
Foreign Bodies crosses borders between east and west, Asia and Europe, the worlds of rich and poor, politics and science. Its thrilling story carries with it the credo of its author on the interconnectedness of humanity and nature; of the powerful and the people. Ultimately, Schama says, as we face the challenges of our times together, “there are no foreigners, only familiars.”