Category Archives: History

Blurb

All you need for a plague to go pandemic are population clusters and travellers spreading the bacterial or viral pathogens. Many prehistoric civilisations died fast, leaving cities undamaged to mystify archeologists. Plague in Athens killed 30% of the population 430-426 BCE. When Roman Emperor Justinian I caught bubonic plague in 541 CE, contemporary historian Procopius described his symptoms: fever, delirium and buboes – large black swellings of the lymphatic glands in the groin, under the arms and behind the ears. That bubonic plague killed 25 million people around the Mediterranean. Later dubbed Black Death, it killed 50 million people 1346-1353, returning to London 40 times in the next 300 years. The third bubonic plague pandemic started 1894 in China, claiming 15 million lives, largely in Asia, before dying down in the 1950s after visiting San Francisco and New York. But it also hit Madagascar in 2014, and the Congo and Peru. The cause, yersinia pestis was identified in 1894. Infected fleas from rats on merchant ships were blamed for spreading it, but Porton Down scientists have a worrying explanation why the plague spread so fast.

Any disease can go epidemic. Everyday European infections brought to the Americas by Cortes’ conquistadores killed millions of the natives, whose posthumous revenge was the syphilis the Spaniards brought back to Europe. The mis-named Spanish ’flu, brought from Kansas to Europe by US troops in 1918 caused more than 50 million deaths. Fifty years later, H3N2 ’flu from Hong Kong killed more than a million people.

One coronavirus produces the common cold, for which neither vaccine nor cure has been found, despite the loss of millions of working days each year. That other coronavirus, Covid-19 was NOT the worst pandemic. Chillingly, historian Douglas Boyd lists many other sub-microscopic killers still waiting for tourism and trade to bring them to us.

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My Review

I received this book in return for an honest review. I’ve had this book since mid-2021, along with another book on pandemics. I’ve been reading it slowly for the best past of 18 months, around work, blog tours and my sci-fi and fantasy TBR pile.

This book covers ancient and historical pandemics, the great plague of the 14th and 17th centuries, the epidemics since the, the Covid-19 pandemic (still on-going) and possible future pandemics. The book was published in 2021, so obviously it misses everything after early 2021.

The chapters on ancient and historical pandemics were fascinating and easy to read. The chapters on the 1665 plague in London was really interesting, as it draws heavily on the diaries of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, and Daniel Defoe’s later book on the plague year, for details of life in London and Chatham.

I found the historical discussion more interesting that the discussion of SARS-CoV-2/Covid-19. There really hadn’t been enough time between the emergence of the pandemic and the writing and publishing of this book. It feels like the author was working on a book about historical epidemics and pandemics, and inserted the covid chapters and potential future causes of pandemics, at the last minute.

The author didn’t critically interrogate some of the things he repeated from the media. There was the odd repeated page in the chapters on historical pandemics, and he uses what can only be described as racist terms to refer to Indian and Chinese people.

This is not a bad book, if you’re interested in historical pandemics, but for analysis of the early months of the current pandemic, there are probably better sources out there.