Synopses & Reviews
Review
"This book studies the great epidemics that have scourged the globe over the course of the last six centuries. The plague, leprosy, smallpox, syphilis, cholera, and yellow fever (a.k.a. malaria) all find their place here. Watts views the movement of epidemics as a manifestation of imperial power. It was the rulers of infected lands who determined the official response to invading diseases and the rulers who would protect privileged groups more than other groups. This exhaustive history begs comparison to the influential work Plagues and Peoples of William McNeill. Particularly interesting is Watts's account of popular interpretation of epidemics as divine revenge on sinners." Reviewed by Andrew Witmer, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)
Synopsis
This book is a major and wide-ranging study of the great epidemic scourges of humanity--plague, leprosy, smallpox, syphilis, cholera, and yellow fever/malaria--over the last six centuries. It is also much more. Sheldon Watts, a cultural and social historian who has spent much of his career studying and teaching in the world's South, applies a wholly original perspective to the study of global disease, exploring the connections between the movement of epidemics and the manifestations of imperial power in the Americas, Asia, Africa, and in European homelands. He shows how the perceptions of whom a disease targeted changed over time and effected various political and medical responses. He argues that not only did Western medicine fail to cure the diseases that its own expansion engendered, but that imperial medicine was in fact an agent and tool of empire.
Watts examines the relationship between the pre-modern and modern medical profession and such epidemic disasters as the plague in western Europe and the Middle East; leprosy in the medieval West and in the nineteenth-century tropical world; the spread of smallpox to the New World in the age of exploration; syphilis and nonsexual diseases in Europe's connection with Asia; cholera in India during British rule; and malaria in the Atlantic Basin during the eras of slavery and Social Darwinism. He investigates in detail the relation between violent environmental changes and disease, and between disease and society, both in the material sphere and in the minds and spirits of rulers and ruled. This book will become the standard account of the way diseases--arising through chance, through reckless environmental change engineered by man, or through a combination of each--were interpreted in Western Europe and in the colonized world.
Synopsis
"One of the best portrayals of life in Europe and the Islamic world during the medieval Great Plague. . . . Watts offers solid, stunning examples of Western idiocy that created superhighways for once-obscure microbes, leading to horrendous epidemics. . . . A perspective that Western, particularly Caucasian, policy-makers would do well to comprehend."--Laurie Garrett, Foreign Affairs "Fascinating . . . Watts] exposes to daylight the dire effect of the elites' often misinformed conception of these diseases, and how they, the elites, manipulated epidemiological crises to their advantage."--Alfred Crosby, Washington Post
This book is a major and wide-ranging study of the great epidemic scourges of humanity--plague, leprosy, smallpox, syphilis, cholera, and yellow fever/malaria--over the last six centuries. It is also much more. Sheldon Watts applies a wholly original perspective to the study of global disease, exploring the connections between the movement of epidemics and the manifestations of imperial power in the Americas, Asia, Africa, and in European homelands. He argues that not only did Western medicine fail to cure the diseases that its own expansion engendered, but that imperial medicine was in fact an agent and tool of empire.
Watts examines the relationship between the pre-modern and modern medical profession and such epidemic disasters as the plague in western Europe and the Middle East; leprosy in the medieval West and in the nineteenth-century tropical world; the spread of smallpox to the New World in the age of exploration; syphilis and nonsexual diseases in Europe's connection with Asia; cholera in India during British rule; and malaria in the Atlantic Basin during the eras of slavery and Social Darwinism. This book will become the standard account of the way diseases--arising through chance, through reckless environmental change engineered by man, or through a combination of each--were interpreted in Western Europe and in the colonized world, and offers an interesting historical perspective for a world dealing with the spread of COVID-19.