Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present by Frank M. Snowden (review)

Thematically, the book concentrates on the intellectual, cultural, and public health contexts of epidemics, with frequent attention to the interplay of war and disease. The main disappointment (for me) in his choices of what to include and what to leave out is the extremely thin treatment of the disease experience of the Americas in the wake of Columbus. For readers interested primarily in Europe's cultural, scientific, and public health engagement with epidemics, this book will serve admirably.

From Chimps to Bats: Human Social Evolution and Pandemic Potential over 15,000 Years

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, like past pandemics and those yet to come, is self-inflicted. For most of human history, our ancestors lived much like chimpanzees, in small, mobile groups and hosted few viruses as a result. With the evolution of farming, cities, and ever-improving transport networks, our more recent ancestors lived more like bats, in tightly packed clusters that encouraged the transmission, reproduction, and mutation of viruses and other potential pathogens. Unlike those of bats, human immune systems are not calibrated by some 64 million years of evolutionary adapta-tion to heavy viral loads. So our potential as hosts for global pandemics is strong.