Excellent book on the influence of disease on history

Contains an eyewitness account of the plague of Athens (430 BCE), by a victim who survived

The first book to argue that the Black Death was not bubonic plague

Sources on the Black Death

Although Shrewsbury assumes, almost certainly wrongly, that the Black Death and subsequent plagues were bubonic plague, his book is still very useful

The biography of typhus, one of the worst killers in history

Defoe's account of the plague of London is fiction, but Defoe was a journalist and it has been argued that he based himself on reliable sources. Of course, one should also read Pepys' diary

Smallpox was the major killer once the age of plagues had ended, though it largely afflicted children

How we discovered cholera was water-borne. The Broad Street pump was in Broadwick Street, W1, in Soho. A replica (not in the correct position) can be seen there today

A more recent book on the 1918 pandemic

Albert Camus' fictional outbreak of bubonic plague in French North Africa is really an allegory of the Second World War