The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris

Ever since the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, scientists have dreamed of preventing catastrophic outbreaks of infectious disease. Yet despite a century of medical progress, viral and bacterial disasters continue to take us by surprise, inciting panic and dominating news cycles. From the Spanish flu to the 1924 outbreak of pneumonic plague in Los Angeles to the 1930 "parrot fever" pandemic, through the more recent SARS, Ebola, and Zika epidemics, the last one hundred years have been marked by a succession of unanticipated pandemic alarms.

In The Pandemic Century, a lively account of scares both infamous and less known, Mark Honigsbaum combines reportage with the history of science and medical sociology to artfully reconstruct epidemiological mysteries and the ecology of infectious diseases. We meet dedicated disease detectives, obstructive or incompetent public health officials, and brilliant scientists often blinded by their own knowledge of bacteria and viruses. We also see how fear of disease often exacerbates racial, religious, and ethnic tensions--even though, as the epidemiologists Malik Peiris and Yi Guan write, "'nature' remains the greatest bioterrorist threat of all."

Like man-eating sharks, predatory pathogens are always present in nature, waiting to strike; when one is seemingly vanquished, others appear in its place. These pandemics remind us of the limits of scientific knowledge, as well as the role that human behavior and technologies play in the emergence and spread of microbial diseases.

Author: Mark Honigsbaum
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 04/09/2019
Pages: 464
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.80lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.40w x 1.20d
ISBN: 9780393254754

Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 02/01/2019 pg. 88
Library Journal Prepub Alert 11/15/2018 pg. 63
Publishers Weekly 11/26/2018
Library Journal 04/01/2019 pg. 63
Booklist 02/15/2019 pg. 20
Choice 10/01/2019

About the Author
Honigsbaum, Mark: - Mark Honigsbaum is a medical historian, journalist, and author of five books including The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris and The Fever Trail: In Search of the Cure for Malaria. He is currently a lecturer at City University of London.