Product Description

The Black Death, the Great Plague, leprosy, smallpox: the very names now have a historical - almost a mythological - ring. With our space-age hospitals and wonder drugs, surely we've consigned pestilence to the past? Even AIDS hasn't succeeded in persuading us otherwise . . . In this shocking, scintillating book, biohistorian Arno Karlen questions this complacent conspiracy, tracing the continuities of contagion from ancient times to the present day. An epic of epidemic, the story is, he says, anything but over: indeed we may well be standing on the brink of disaster.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1064055 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

About the Author
Arno Karlen's essays on history, medicine and behavioural science have appeared in many scholarly journals and popular magazines. He is the author of several books, and lives in New York City.

Customer Reviews

An informative and entertaining dialogue for the newcomer
Karlen provides the reader here with an excellent introduction to the topic of the natural, as well as social history of the most common human life-threatening diseases. Covered here are all the usual (as well as some more unusual) suspects, from mediaeval plagues to AIDS and CJD; from soldiers not warring due to disease outbreak, to war outbreak being signalled by disease. Although there are some one-liners for conspiracy theorists with regards man-made disease vectors, the principal thesis of this book is that new pandemic and epidemic outbreaks of disease result from changes in human and other microbe host behaviours and the situated environment(s) in which these changes take place. For example, changes in land usage, habitat (as much in the 'home' as in the field), species interactions, development & redevelopment, etc.., necessarily give rise to novel ecological niches available for exploitation by any number of host/pathogenic organisms and disease vector transmission pathways. Karlen is correct to further emphasise the point that such opportunist developments and novel disease situations arise from constructive events (aircraft transportation of secondary hosts, air-conditioner habitats and overuse of antibiotics) as much as from destructive events (deforestation and animal extintions give rise to traditional host-parasite species shifts). A useful summary table is provided of the time-line of recent life-threatening contagious diseases, but I found myself annotating the margin with a few more details concerning each (e.g., secondary host - rodent, cattle, insect; virus/bacteria/protozoan organism etc) - all of which was nonetheless available in the text of the book. Although a delicate subject for those suffering from any of the conditions described here (both directly and by atives/carers nearby), Karlen presents both an informative and entertaining dialogue for the newcomer to the topic of disease - clearly accessible and in non-technical language for the lay reader looking for a clearer understanding of a life-threatening phenomena that is likely to always be with us in some form. If I were to have any grumbles, they would relate solely to a few of my own particular interests in a couple of theories given short thrift here. Such might include exposures to man-made/altered disease vectors (cf: Moreno; whether they be designed for plant, insect or human control via innoculation) and the theories put forward by writers such as Lyn Margulis (symbiotic evolution) and the more esoteric writings of Hoyle & Wickramasinge or Francis Crick. So much better informed concerning the role of natural, political and historical events influencing pandemic and epidemic disease evolution, following our reading of this Kaplan book one might be in a better position to explain our forgetting of the 1918 flu pandemic, the last widespread disease within living memory, taking a total number of lives far greater than the toll of the last century's World Wars combined. How, and whether, such information will be used to manage the future of our social behaviour, demography, medical practice, and our continuing scientific research culture, we must await the coming years to find out.

References:

Crick: Life Itself.

Hoyle & Wickramasinge: Diseases from Space; Evolution from Space.

Margulis & Fester: Symbiosis as a source of Evolutionary Innovation.

Margulis & Sagan: Microcosmos.

Moreno: Undue Risk.

This will open your eyes
A book like this soon rids you of the myth that man is "in charge" of his own destiny on this tiny planet. We are constantly at war with the environment around us. Will man survive in this battle ~ somehow I doubt it! We are hopelessly outnumbered and we take too long to evolve, our "enemies" have evolved within a couple of generations....we are already losing the battle against our microscopic enemies while we simultaneously convince ourselves of our superiority and invincibility. A must read book ~ and buy your friends a copy too.

Where do bugs come from?
This is an excellent book, packed with facts about diseases and the humans who succumb to them, past and present. At last, here is an overview of our relations with the bugs that infest us. It's a wonderful insight into how human activity can spread and encouraged the evolution of new infectious agents - even now. In that respect, this book carries a health warning. For example, farming, it seems, is one way in which we have invited viral diseases, like measles and flu, into our homes and our bodies and still do today.
But, the beauty of the book is in the rich tapestry of history it weaves, from the first farmers 10,000 years ago to the newest problem diseases of the West, like HIV and Lymes disease. Even better, the book is well written and easy to read, whether you read it from cover to cover or use it as a quick reference. No specialist knowledge is required - Arno Karlen has done a great job of making a very complex and wide ranging topic accessible to us all.