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The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris - Paperback | Diverse Reads

The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris

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With a New Chapter and Updated Epilogue on Coronavirus

A Financial Times Best Health Book of 2019 and a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice

"Honigsbaum does a superb job covering a century’s worth of pandemics and the fears they invariably unleash." —Howard Markel, MD, PhD, director of the Center for the History of Medicine, University of Michigan

How can we understand the COVID-19 pandemic? Ever since the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, scientists have dreamed of preventing such catastrophic outbreaks of infectious disease. Yet despite a century of medical progress, viral and bacterial disasters continue to take us by surprise, inciting panic and dominating news cycles. In The Pandemic Century, a lively account of scares both infamous and less known, medical historian Mark Honigsbaum combines reportage with the history of science and medical sociology to artfully reconstruct epidemiological mysteries and the ecology of infectious diseases. We meet dedicated disease detectives, obstructive or incompetent public health officials, and brilliant scientists often blinded by their own knowledge of bacteria and viruses—and see how fear of disease often exacerbates racial, religious, and ethnic tensions. Now updated with a new chapter and epilogue.

ISBN-13: 9780393541311

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Norton W. W. & Company Inc.

Publication Date: 06-16-2020

Pages: 480

Product Dimensions: 8.10(w) x 5.30(h) x 1.20(d)

Mark Honigsbaum is a medical historian, journalist, and author of five books including The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris and The Fever Trail: In Search of the Cure for Malaria. He is currently a lecturer at City University of London.

Table of Contents

Prologue Sharks and Other Predators 1

Chapter I The Blue Death 17

Chapter II Plague in the City of Angels 63

Chapter III The Great Parrot Fever Pandemic 103

Chapter IV The "Philly Killer" 145

Chapter V Legionnaires' Redux 175

Chapter VI Aids in America, Aids in Africa 193

Chapter VII Sars: "Super Spreader" 237

Chapter VIII Ebola at the Borders 277

Chapter IX Z is for Zika 317

Chapter X Disease X 361

Epilogue The Pandemic Century 385

Acknowledgments 393

Abbreviations 397

Notes 399

Illustration Credits 449

Index 451