Synopses & Reviews
A century ago, the third bubonic plague swept the globe, taking more than 15 million lives.
Plague Ports tells the story of ten cities on five continents that were ravaged by the epidemic in its initial years: Hong Kong and Bombay, the Asian emporiums of the British Empire where the epidemic first surfaced; Sydney, Honolulu and San Francisco, three “pearls” of the Pacific; Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro in South America; Alexandria and Cape Town in Africa; and Oporto in Europe.
Myron Echenberg examines plague's impact in each of these cities, on the politicians, the medical and public health authorities, and especially on the citizenry, many of whom were recent migrants crammed into grim living spaces. He looks at how different cultures sought to cope with the challenge of deadly epidemic disease, and explains the political, racial, and medical ineptitudes and ignorance that allowed the plague to flourish. The forces of globalization and industrialization, Echenberg argues, had so increased the transmission of microorganisms that infectious disease pandemics were likely, if not inevitable.
This fascinating, expansive history, enlivened by harrowing photographs and maps of each city, sheds light on urbanism and modernity at the turn of the century, as well as on glaring public health inequalities. With the recent outbreaks of SARS and avian flu, and ongoing fears of bioterrorism, Plague Ports offers a necessary and timely historical lesson.
Review
“Provides an in-depth look at the ineffectiveness of certain public health disease control measures such as quarantine, isolation of patient contacts, and the importance of using knowledge of the pathogen's disease ecology for the development and implementation of effective control measures.”
-International Journal of African Historical Studies,
Review
“Echenbergs richly textured and deeply discerning account of the last plague pandemic is, as he points out, a cautionary tale of the politics of disease control in a globalized world. It should become compulsory reading for all who are engaged in the construction of the new discipline of global public health.”
-Dorothy Porter,in The New England Journal of Medicine
Review
“Well written and fluent in narrating its stories, this work can provide good reading not only for historians and students specializing in medicine, but for a wider public as well.”
-Journal of World History,
Review
“
Plague Ports highlights how international trade had connected ports in different continents by the end of the nineteenth century, with the potential to transform local epidemics into global pandemics.”
- Journal of African History
Review
“Echenberg’s richly textured and deeply discerning account of the last plague pandemic is, as he points out, a cautionary tale of the politics of disease control in a globalized world. It should become compulsory reading for all who are engaged in the construction of the new discipline of global public health.”
“Provides an in-depth look at the ineffectiveness of certain public health disease control measures such as quarantine, isolation of patient contacts, and the importance of using knowledge of the pathogen's disease ecology for the development and implementation of effective control measures.”
“Well written and fluent in narrating its stories, this work can provide good reading not only for historians and students specializing in medicine, but for a wider public as well.”
“Plague Ports highlights how international trade had connected ports in different continents by the end of the nineteenth century, with the potential to transform local epidemics into global pandemics.”
“[Echenberg] does an excellent job of presenting complex political and social consequences of the plague.”
Review
“[Echenberg] does an excellent job of presenting complex political and social consequences of the plague.”
-Choice, Recommended,
Review
"Wonderfully readable and insightful, Robin Gregg's book shows us how contemporary, privileged women actually experience pregnancy. Instead of fluffy femininity or mechanized patients, these women are careful decision-makers trying to gain control of one of the most important events in their lives. A tour de force!"-Shulamit Reinharz,author of Feminist Methods in Social Research
Review
"A great read about one of the primal experiences of the human race. No one, male or female, parent or child-free, can come away from this book without a profound awe and an utterly changed sense of the meaning of pregnancy." -Deborah A. Stone,Professor of Law and Social Policy, Brandeis University
Synopsis
Reveals the global effects of the bubonic plague, and what we can learn from this earlier pandemic
A century ago, the third bubonic plague swept the globe, taking more than 15 million lives. Plague Ports tells the story of ten cities on five continents that were ravaged by the epidemic in its initial years: Hong Kong and Bombay, the Asian emporiums of the British Empire where the epidemic first surfaced; Sydney, Honolulu and San Francisco, three "pearls" of the Pacific; Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro in South America; Alexandria and Cape Town in Africa; and Oporto in Europe.
Myron Echenberg examines plague's impact in each of these cities, on the politicians, the medical and public health authorities, and especially on the citizenry, many of whom were recent migrants crammed into grim living spaces. He looks at how different cultures sought to cope with the challenge of deadly epidemic disease, and explains the political, racial, and medical ineptitudes and ignorance that allowed the plague to flourish. The forces of globalization and industrialization, Echenberg argues, had so increased the transmission of microorganisms that infectious disease pandemics were likely, if not inevitable.
This fascinating, expansive history, enlivened by harrowing photographs and maps of each city, sheds light on urbanism and modernity at the turn of the century, as well as on glaring public health inequalities. With the recent outbreak of COVID-19, and ongoing fears of bioterrorism, Plague Ports offers a necessary and timely historical lesson.
Synopsis
View the Table of Contents. Read the Preface.
aProvides an in-depth look at the ineffectiveness of certain public health disease control measures such as quarantine, isolation of patient contacts, and the importance of using knowledge of the pathogenas disease ecology for the development and implementation of effective control measures.a
--International Journal of African Historical Studies
aEchenbergas richly textured and deeply discerning account of the last plague pandemic is, as he points out, a cautionary tale of the politics of disease control in a globalized world. It should become compulsory reading for all who are engaged in the construction of the new discipline of global public health.a
--New England Journal of Medicine
aEchenberg's richly textured and deeply discerning account of the last plague pandemic is, as he points out, a cautionary tale of the politics of disease control in a globalized world. It should become compulsory reading for all who are engaged in the construction of the new discipline of global public health.a
--Dorothy Porter in The New England Journal of Medicine
a Echenberg] does an excellent job of presenting complex political and social consequences of the plague.a
--Choice, Recommended
aAn extensive comparative study.a
--Science News
aIn an era when global issues have come to dominate public health discourse, Echenberg depicts the bubonic plague epidemic that struck six continents in the decades around 1900. With sophistication and sensitivity, he parses the multiple medical cultures, political systems, and varieties of popular response that met the plague. Few historians would take on such a daunting task: ofchronicling an epidemic in ten cities, working with sources in more than a dozen languages, and comprehending multiple systems of medical thought. Echenberg pulls it off. Plague Ports is a masterwork of global health history.
a--Margaret Humphreys, Duke University
The 1800s were, from Jenner to Pasteur to Koch, the years in which more progress was made in controlling infectious disease than in the previous 10,000, yet at the end of that century Plague swept round the world and killed multitudes as if to admonish us for our arrogance. Most of us today, even students of medical history, have avoided paying heed to that admonishment. Myron Echenberg's excellent scholarship and scientific sophistication oblige us, as we cower under the threat of avian flu, to pay the Third Bubonic Plague pandemic the attention it deserves.
--Alfred Crosby, University of Texas and author of Children of the Sun: A History of Humanity's Unappeasable Appetite for Energy
A century ago, the third bubonic plague swept the globe, taking more than 15 million lives. Plague Ports tells the story of ten cities on five continents that were ravaged by the epidemic in its initial years: Hong Kong and Bombay, the Asian emporiums of the British Empire where the epidemic first surfaced; Sydney, Honolulu and San Francisco, three pearls of the Pacific; Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro in South America; Alexandria and Cape Town in Africa; and Oporto in Europe.
Myron Echenberg examines plague's impact in each of these cities, on the politicians, the medical and public health authorities, and especially on the citizenry, many of whom were recent migrants crammed into grim living spaces. He looks at how differentcultures sought to cope with the challenge of deadly epidemic disease, and explains the political, racial, and medical ineptitudes and ignorance that allowed the plague to flourish. The forces of globalization and industrialization, Echenberg argues, had so increased the transmission of microorganisms that infectious disease pandemics were likely, if not inevitable.
This fascinating, expansive history, enlivened by harrowing photographs and maps of each city, sheds light on urbanism and modernity at the turn of the century, as well as on glaring public health inequalities. With the recent outbreaks of SARS and avian flu, and ongoing fears of bioterrorism, Plague Ports offers a necessary and timely historical lesson.
Synopsis
Too often, in the debate over reproductive rights and technologies, we lose sight of the fundamental emotional and psychological issues that define the experience of pregnancy. Robin Gregg here draws on the words and stories of over thirty women to provide a first- hand perspective on pregnancy in the modern age.
In an age where a new advance in reproductive technology occurs seemingly every month, pregnancy has come to be defined by such medical procedures as prenatal screening, amniocentesis, fetal monitoring, induced labor, and cesarean sections. Public policymakers, ethicists, religious figures, and the medical establishment control the debate, drowning out the voices of women who grapple in the most immediate sense with the issues. Even feminist theorists often overlook the nuances and paradoxes of the reproductive revolution as experienced by individual, particular women.
The reader follows these thirty women as they speak about whether to become pregnant, and by what means; how to choose a health provider; what meaning they attribute to their pregnancies; and how they navigate their way through the contradictory pressures they face during pregnancy. The intimate nature of Gregg's research, consisting as it does largely of women's pregnancy narratives, lends her book a vibrancy often lacking in academic writing about reproduction.
About the Author
Myron Echenberg is professor of history at McGill University. He is the author of Black Death, White Medicine: Bubonic Plague and the Politics of Public Health in Colonial Senegal, 1914-1945 and Colonial Conscripts: The Tirailleurs Sénégalais in French West Africa, 1857-1960.