Boring and badly written in parts but very informational ( )

This book looks at the history of pandemics in the modern developed world, starting with the second plague pandemic, known as the Black Death, that began in Asia and spread westward to Europe in the 14th century, and ending with the 21st century Ebola, H1N1 and first SARS pandemics. The Black Death was a result of a relative scarcity of food in overpopulated cities in Europe, which led to increased need for and transport of goods from the East on merchant vessels that also carried rats which harbored fleas infected with the bacterium Yersinia pestis. The second plague pandemic ended in Europe in the 1350s, but the plague bacillus remained, and sporadic outbreaks recurred until the 18th century, with the best known one being the plague epidemic in London in 1665-1666. As a result, European countries and port cities developed departments of health, in order to regulate the flow of goods on ships and keep their populations as safe as possible.

The most widely used technique was quarantine, in which ships, crew and passengers would have to stay on their vessels for 40 days before they were allowed on shore. Quarantining began in antiquity but took hold during the second plague pandemic, and proved to be a very contoversial and much disliked method to prevent the spread of disease: merchants did not wish to have to wait forty days to unload and sell their goods — time is money, after all — and many of them tried to subvert these regulations; buyers likewise did not want to wait; ships with plague infected crew or passengers were unable to receive adequate medical assistance, and because the well were not permitted to leave the ships many of them were subsequently infected and died; and cities whose countries enacted strict quarantines were at a relative disadvantage in comparison to neighboring countries with more lenient regulations. Due to the lack of knowledge about the spread of infectious diseases physicians fell into two camps, one which believed that these maladies were imported on ships and supported quarantining and social isolation of ill residents and visitors, and the other which believed that miasmas (bad air) and meteorologic changes were to blame for the spread of disease.

Subsequent epidemics and pandemics such as yellow fever in the United States and cholera in Europe were also linked to commerce by sea, particularly the transport of goods from Asia, or the transport of slaves from Africa. Mark Harrison, a professor of the History of Medicine at Oxford, provides well researched and detailed accounts of these outbreaks, and how public health officials and the business communities in the affected cities dealt with the crises, some far better than others.

Contagion is a detailed examination of major pandemics throughout modern history in the Western world, and the role that commerce has played in their spread from one country or region to another. I found it to be a dry and very academic read, however, and because I was far more interested in the relation of the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic to past ones I was disappointed that this book did not provide the analysis through time that I was looking for. ( )