The writer of this review, Monica Green, also wrote a review at Inference Review to which we linked, "The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World".
That post was one of our ten most popular links of 2018, she is very good at what she does.
From the Los Angeles Review of Books:
THERE HAS BEEN a lot of imperfect thinking about disease the past two years. As the world has collectively experienced a throwback to an era without the protections of effective medical interventions, more broadly conceived histories — true pandemic histories — are hard to find. Many of the bigger questions have gone unanswered, and sometimes unasked. Where do infectious diseases come from? When and how do they disappear? Have there been times or circumstances when disease burdens were heavier or lighter? Where do we, in our present COVID-19 moment, sit within that history?
Billed as “a monumental history of humans and their germs,” Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History by Roman economic historian Kyle Harper offers an opportunity to consider what “good thinking” in disease history might look like. Harper’s background as a Classicist, as well as his demonstrated interest in the new ways climatology and genetics enable reinvestigation of Roman history, would, one might expect, situate him as a welcome new interpreter of humans’ encounters with disease. Plagues Upon the Earth is a book meant to impress. The notes run to nearly 60 of its 700 pages, the list of references to nearly 90. In all, over 2,100 references are cited. Surely this is the global history the world has needed. Presumably, we will find a story that differs significantly from the half-century-old accounts of Alfred Crosby and William McNeill, who wrote in the pre-AIDS 1970s about infectious diseases as history-altering forces. Given the extraordinary strides in global historical thinking in the same half-century, one would especially hope to see framings beyond a European focus. These hopes are only partially fulfilled.
Harper’s thesis is simple: “Our germs are a product of our history.” By that, he means that different infectious diseases have arisen at different inflection points in humans’ collective journey on the planet, often due to human behaviors themselves. The oldest diseases, such as gastrointestinal parasites, date from our time as hunter-gatherers. Sedentism and domestication of animals brought other types of pathogens, as did the new respiratory environments of increasingly crowded urban communities in the Bronze and Iron Ages. The interconnected world of medieval trade intensified disease spread in Eurasia and Africa, while the unification of the world’s tropical zones during the age of European colonialism allowed additional diseases to spread intercontinentally. Finally, new sources of energy and new transportation technologies of the 19th and 20th centuries allowed the speed of spread to increase nearly a hundredfold, even as urban communities (the ultimate microbial playgrounds) grew ever larger.
The history of infectious diseases is one of the more difficult fields within the history of medicine. The documentary record on which it is grounded has inherent limitations. In, say, the Hippocratic Corpus or Ayurvedic traditions (composed in a pre-laboratory age when observation of microorganisms was impossible), the disease conceptions differ so much from germ theory conceptions that, in the absence of very precise symptom descriptions, it is impossible to translate past categories into modern terms. This is known as the problem of retrospective diagnosis.
For the material history of disease, paleopathologists (a sister subspecialty within physical anthropology) can look at lesions created on bones or teeth by chronic health conditions, such as malaria or sustained malnutrition. But microorganisms are impossible to discern even with a microscope, since they (like most soft tissues) are destroyed as postmortem decay sets in. A quick-killing disease like plague could never be assessed from ocular examination of the bones alone.
Riding the crest of a decade-old shift in infectious disease research, Harper exploits a new generation of scholarship that engages openly with data yielded by genetics. Why genetics? Harper cutely describes the twin contributions of this field as “tree thinking” and “time travel.” Nicknames notwithstanding, this is high-tech science of the first order.
“Tree thinking” is phylogenetics, which analyzes either whole genomes or partial genomic sequences to find common variants in different lineages of pathogens. Simply put, it studies the evolution of microorganisms. Tuberculosis (TB), for example, has nine known lineages, each with many localized strains. Analyzed one against another, these variants allow construction of phylogenetic trees — family trees showing, for example, how closely related a strain of tuberculosis in India might be to a strain in the Philippines or Ethiopia. (It’s a pity that a book with more than two dozen images, figures, maps, and tables couldn’t have offered a single figure showing how visually-oriented “tree thinking” analysis works.)....
....MUCH MORE