Disease and history

twentieth century, as new disciplines were being continually created, expunged and replaced, greater effort should have been made in this section to formulate more cohesion and unity of thought. With the encyclopaedic format in which this increasing specialization is presented, it is more useful as a reference book than as a monograph. Aimed at the lay reader, Disease and history traces the effect of disease on history through the ages. This "enlarged and fully revised version" of the 1972 edition covers more fully the impact of smallpox, influenza and tuberculosis. The concluding chapter is also an attempt to bring the book up to date with contemporary concerns. The first chapter deals with disease in the ancient world, and focuses almost entirely on Western civilization and Graeco-Roman antiquity. The account is seriously flawed in that, despite the importance of eastern civilizations at that time, the references made to the non-European world are in the following vein: "To north and west [of the Roman Empire] lay the oceans, to south and east wide unknown continents in which dwelt less civilized peoples: Africans, Arabs and the savage tribes of Asia. Beyond, in the dim shadows, lay the ancient civilizations of India and China" (p. 9). This is especially striking given that today, in the face of dissatisfaction with Western medicine, people are increasingly turning to alternative medicine from these "dim shadow" civilizations. In the second chapter the authors study the Black Death and the horror it inspired in medieval times. While the part dealing with the medical analysis and the spread of the disease is well written, that which seeks to establish causal sequences with major historical developments of the time is often farfetched. This is even more evident in the chapter on syphilis. The extremely laboured connection between the affliction of Ivan the Terrible with syphilis (in itself by no means a certain fact) and the development of Tsarist absolutism in Russia completely ignores the structural aspects of Russian society that social historians have painfully reconstructed to understand better the unique developments there. The next chapter, one of the best, studies smallpox. The authors provide an engrossing account of the way the disease works and how epidemics develop. The attempts to find a cure and the identification of how the disease is transmitted, as well as a historical treatment of the techniques of variolation and vaccination make engaging reading. To the extent …