Customer Reviews

Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism

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This work is impressive in its breadth of scholarship, but the author's personal rancor at Europeans' ill treatment of the rest of the world detracts from the narrative. The descriptions of the decimation of the Taino, the Aztecs, Inca and others within a century by the Spanish is truly horrific. Repeatedly referring to the Spanish as "terrorists" weakens, rather than reinforces the point. They were not terrorists: they were behaving as Europeans historically have. The author's succinct explanation of the reasons for the Spanish attitudes toward New World peoples makes his subsequent indignation with their actions curious, to say the least. Similarly, his explanation of malaria and yellow fever is extensive, but his indignation at Europeans in response to the diseases detracts from his scholarship. That Europeans are arrogant, naive, biased, pig-headed, murderous and short-sighted should come as no revelation to anyone reading this book. Other peoples in the world are too, but they didn't all have the opportunity to impose their will on others. To complement this work, Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel,and MacNeill's The Rise of the West, and Plagues and Peoples cover much of the same ground and posit theories how Europeans came to be in a position to impose their will on much of the rest of the world. Overall, a very interesting book, which would be better without these occasional, distracting polemics.

Sheldon Watts took us on a journey of exploration of a gigantic subject, followed his political views and lost his way. This book wants to put such a strong spin on disease as as an element of conquest, that it neglects and distorts too many facts. You can usually find the distortions by noting which paragraphs contain statements that treat some previously unknown fact as common knowledge and then not finding an end note providing some references. I also noted that most of the sources for the book were less than ten years old, and were often teritiary. Sheldon Watts also gets his biological facts wrong on many occasions, usually when trying to underline some action he feels is imperialist. His most unpardonable sin has to be attributing current knowledge to figures who had no such understanding, and then judging their actions using that assumption. For example, he assumes that since people understood that smallpox was communicable, that they had to understand that all diseases were communicable. This was long before Koch or even Snow. And Sheldon Watts does this even though he acknowledges that medical knowledge was effectively non-existant until the mid-1800s. Unless of course it is folk wisdom that he is talking about, which gets a pass, no matter how silly. If you are a Powerful White Man, on the other hand, you are assumed to be omniscient.

If you want a more limited treatment about the subject of diseases and public thought, I suggest that you try "The Cholera Years" by Charles E. Rosenberg. If you want a good treatment of multiple diseases and their biological progression around the world, try "Plagues" by Christopher Wills. Those two books together will cost less than this one, and you'll learn more. And they are far, far more readable.

Seldon Watts embarked on a very difficult and higly political issue. You may agree or disagree that imperialist powers used contagious diseases as yet another weapon but everyone has to agree that this is a new perspective in viewing history. For example, i was amazed by his analysis in Leprosy and found it to be logic, even though i don't have his sources available. Sometimes the scientific data seem a bit weak but if you want details on each and every disease there other books to consult. This book talks about politics.
I see this great book as a cry from a scientist of the ''Third world'' who reminds that science (and charity) is not as neutral as we sometimes consider it to be. Personally i believe it is a ''must'', even if you disagree with the author politically.

Watts' book is a series of related essays about the social construction of 6 major diseases. He has poured years of research into this work. The thesis of each chapter is fascinating, and most may well be correct. For example, he posits that biblical leprosy was not Hansen's Disease, and further that medieval leprosy was a social category, and that the "lepers" of that time did not have the disease. There could be something to this.

But this book cannot do better than raise the questions. There are both scientific and historical aspects to this book, but the editing did not bring the writing close to scientific standards. Many generalizations are based on a single piece of evidence. Primary sources are cited without considering that the author's comments may have been self-serving.

Epidemics and History loses its way badly when it tries to intuit the intentions of groups of people, rather than letting their actions speak for themselves. A word count would reveal unusually high frequencies for "desire," "intention," "understanding," "perception," and so forth. I wonder to what extent groups of people through history have been aware of themselves as groups, as the book assumes throughout. Further, it tries to inflame with unnecessary emotive language. Pity.

Academic anti-imperialism was the wrong voice for this work. Watts' research is interesting, theses provocative. But the writing is all wrong. Where were the editors?

If you are interested in the history of disease, you do want to know what Watts says. But the flawed writing makes this a frustrating read.

I found this book an excellent companion to earlier books on the subject (McNeill, Crosby), as it puts diseases in human society in a historic social/cultural and political context. I started out sceptical but then got caught by the book and its analyis was for me an eye-opener on how (Western) medicine was a tool often used for ends that had nothing to do with physical well-being, sickness prevention and care. The end conclusions on economics and health economics i do not share at all, i think the author gets carried away a bit and goes way too fast to condemn economists here, (guess what my profession is). Definitely worth while.

The book has a very attractive and rather unkown subject. The analysis of different diseases and interactions between social powers, religion and the emergence of diseases is very interesting. But the information given about the Eastern and Islamic world is confined to Egypt. The author makes comments only relying on the Egyptian data and this is rather weak. But as a whole the book gives very useful information and shows that all these medical advances now and in history are not so innocent as in most cases economic concerns suppress humanity.

Shelson Watts' Epidemics and History is an absolutely indispensible book. It is no exaggeraton to call it one of the most important books ever published. Watts is fearless in pulling the curtains back on the West's delusions and self-told lies. The book shows the connections among racism, imperialism, corporatism, capitalism, poverty, and disease. The conclusions are shocking, but it his penetrating analysis which renders what is shocking also understandable. Read this book.