Read it if… after going through a year of the pandemic (and finding ourselves again facing an abyss…) I would like to put our historical moment in perspective, understand the implications and expectations and remember that humanity has been here before and survived (transformed…) to tell the tale.

”Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present” is part of the Yale Open Courses series. In this fascinating book, Professor Frank Snowden surveys a catalog of epidemics and pandemics over the centuries from the Justinian Plague of the 5th to 7th centuries to HIV and Ebola and explores the impact that epidemic diseases have had throughout the ages. throughout history and how they have influenced not only the advancement of medicine but also the arts (think of Modigliani’s tubercular beauties or The Lady of the Camellias), religion and even war, coming to play a crucial and decisive role in historical moments that defined our present moment.

The exhaustive multidisciplinary research that underpins the series of university lectures on which Dr. Snowden bases his book is presented here in a way that is accessible to the average reader curious enough about the subject. It is an exciting read that makes it almost impossible to put the book down, with information for fans of the arts, political history, sociology, as well as for students of the history of medicine itself.

One of the book’s greatest insights is that Dr. Snowden does not present a mechanistic explanation of cause and effect for the explosion of major epidemics throughout history, in terms of spread of agent and effect, but rather that at all times takes into account and explains how social conditions such as overcrowding and poverty of marginalized groups play a huge role in the severity of pandemics and how these groups are the most terribly affected at all times. And in the vast majority of cases, the most effective strategy to minimize the exposure of a society to epidemic diseases would have been to attack poverty as the driver of these.

The book hit the streets in October 2019 at a time when humanity was unaware that it was about to plunge into one of the worst pandemics that has attacked it in history. And it relates how in the past superstitious resistance to “modern” health measures in some cases worsened the situation or prolonged the suffering of many epidemics. And it reminds us how historical pandemics never disappeared in two weeks or a year. And sometimes a century.

“Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present” (The Open Yale Courses Series) by Dr. Frank Snowden.