The Power of Plagues

This book languishes in some obscurity, published at a high price by a rather arcane scientific society. I hope some mass publisher has the sense to buy the rights and bring it out in paperback. It deserves the widest circulation. The book is a survey of major diseases, their biology, their transmission, and their major historic effects. Irwin Sherman talks about disease in general, then about such famous historic crises as the Black Death in medieval Europe, then about major diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis. Much of the book covers fairly familiar ground, if you have read such well-known disease histories as William McNeill's PLAGUES AND PEOPLES. However, several things set this book apart. First, it's extremely accurate. Few know the biology better. The history has been carefully researched and updated. Controversial statements are flagged as such. Second, Sherman covers all the new plagues that have afflicted us in recent years. I think this is the first such general history to deal with hantavirus, mad cow disease, bird flu, and the rest. Third, the book is well written and reasonably well illustrated (I wish there had been more pictures). Some minor limitations: Sherman is too quick to assume the Black Death was largely bubonic plague. This has been challenged, and the debate could have used more coverage. I wish, also, that a bit more had been done with some of the great recent disease-fighters. Sherman covers Koch, Pasteur, Semmelweisz, and the other classic names, but I wish he had mentioned some of the modern ones not covered in other books. Some are appealing characters, such Maurice Hillebrant, the would-be hog farmer and hog veterinarian who (fortunately for humans but unfortunately for hogs) got interested in people and developed the MMR and several other standard shots, thus saving tens of millions of lives. There is also James Grant, who as head of UNICEF in the 1980s got those shots actually out to the world; at the start of his tenure only a quarter of the world's children got all their shots, but when he retired some three-quarters did. Again, tens of millions of children saved. We all know the names of mass murderers from Hitler to Pol Pot; why don't we know the names of people who saved so many lives? There are very few outright errors in Sherman's book, and those few are pretty trivial. One concerns the Chinese medical text "Huangdi Neijing" or "Nei Ching." It is misspelled "Nei Chang" here, and given two different dates, both wrong (2700 BC on p. 136 and ca 250 BC on p. 304; some of the book does date as early as the latter date, but the actual date of the final product is around 100 A.D., and there was some subsequent updating). In short, anyone looking for a fascinating, authoritative, up-to-date book about disease should check this out. Full disclosure: I have to admit bias. For years and years, at the University of California, Riverside, Sherman taught a basic int