Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism (Hardcover)

by Dr. Sheldon Watts (Author) "In the summer of 1347 rats and fleas infected with bubonic plague boarded Genoese merchant ships at Caffa on the Black Sea..." (more)
Key Phrases: health provisioners, dark hidden meanings, cholera dead, New World, Native Americans, North America (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From The New England Journal of Medicine
In ancient Greece, the great medical teacher Hippocrates taught his students that medicine may consist of many things, but it is always concerned with the patient, the physician, and the disease. In the past two decades, spurred on, no doubt, by a worldwide AIDS epidemic that caught the Western world unprepared to acknowledge that infections can still be such threats to our well-being, the history of disease has become a veritable scholarly industry. Epidemics have always struck terror and have always been of dramatic interest.

Nancy Gallagher, a historian of medicine and public health in Tunisia, described three main historical approaches to the analysis of epidemics in the past: epidemics as causative agents of change, epidemics as mirrors reflecting social processes, and epidemics as ways of illustrating changing medical theories and practices (Medicine and Power in Tunisia, 1780-1900. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). In Epidemics and History, a large and at times complex work of historical synthesis, historian Sheldon Watts, who has taught in Nigeria and Egypt and lives in Cairo, brings together all three of these approaches and an immense body of secondary literature on the history of diseases and their social, political, economic, and cultural consequences. Watts has read widely and perceptively. He is not the first to tackle the subject of disease and the public health response to it as a tool of empire building, nor is he alone in showing that disease is one of the ties that binds industrialized societies to those in the Third World. "Migration of man and his maladies is the chief cause of epidemics," Alfred Crosby noted in Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing, 1972).

The heart of Watts's book consists of six long chapters about seven diseases that have plagued humankind: bubonic plague in Western Europe and the Middle East from 1347 to 1844, leprosy in the West in the Middle Ages and as a tropical disease in more recent times, smallpox from 1518 to its eradication in 1977, syphilis in Western Europe and East Asia from 1492 to 1965, cholera in Great Britain and India from 1817 to 1920, and yellow fever and malaria from 1647 to 1928. To give some notion of the breadth and depth of this book, the last chapter is 55 pages long and has 213 notes, most with multiple references.

The convenience of so much history of disease in one place is obvious. To obtain such broad coverage, readers would have to consult the dozens of monographs Watts has read and cited. Curiously missing from his extensive list of readings is The Cambridge World History of Human Disease, edited by Kenneth Kiple (New York: Cambridge University Press). Published five years ago, Kiple's book, with nearly 160 contributors and more than 1100 pages, is an indispensable source of information about the history of disease, both epidemic and endemic.

For readers who do not want to consult many separate monographs or an encyclopedic work such as The Cambridge World History, this book is a good place to start. Epidemics and History is very well written, though dense in parts. It is also remarkably free of the jargon that too often characterizes discussions of the social consequences of disease. That the germ theory is a theoretical construct and that diseases may be viewed as both biologic and social constructs now finds wide agreement. Watts unfortunately adds yet another variant, the notion of a leprosy construct or a yellow fever construct. If what he means to imply here is the political or social responses to the disease, I would have preferred simply speaking in terms of response.

One oversimplification Watts indulges in is to ascribe the advent of modern scientific medicine to the work of one man, Robert Koch, which ignores the much more complex story of our understanding of the germ theory of disease. To blame Koch for the excesses of his followers in turning medicine into a highly specialized undertaking with more emphasis on disease than on those who suffer from illness is also an oversimplification. By now, most medical readers are quite used to such charges. They can be overlooked in this otherwise engrossing book.

Reviewed by Gert H. Brieger, M.D., Ph.D.
Copyright © 1998 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved. The New England Journal of Medicine is a registered trademark of the MMS.

Review
"At the heart of Epidemics and History is a keen appreciation of the contribution, both to plagues and our responses to them, of social inequalities. I am willing to predict that Watts's trenchant examination of African leprosaria will become classic medical history." -- Paul Farmer M.D., Harvard Medical School, in Natural History September, 1998.

"Based in Cairo and hence immune from automatic Eurocentrism, Watts is as sceptical of the medical profession as of the governments and business interests they ultimately served. His case carries much conviction." -- Roy Porter, Wellcome History of Medicine, London, in The Times, London, November 20, 1997

"[Watts] has taken upon himself the task of crossing the no man's land between the liberal arts and sciences and deserves a pat on the back...its fascinating." -- Alfred Crosby, University of Texas, in The Washington Post August 18, 1998.

"[Watts] shows how widely human predatory instincts have always conditioned attitudes to disease so as to exploit any prevailing epidemic--the darker side of history as it were--and a compelling and dramatic read." -- Alan Cameron in Lloyds List, London, January 10, 1998.

"a bold and imaginative attempt at synthesis. Yellow fever and malaria provide him with striking examples of how disease was used to bolster arguments about racial superiority and segregation in the American south and colonial west Africa." -- David Arnold, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, The Times Higher Education Supplement, January 16, 1998.

"a large and at times complex work of historical synthesis. The convenience of so much history of diseases in one place is obvious. [An] engrossing book." -- Gert Brieger M.D., Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, in The New England Journal of Medicine July 2, 1989.

"a massive work of synthesis...Watts's book draws on recent critical studies which demonstrate how during times of epidemic disease, and in the heyday of communicable diseases such as leprosy and syphilis, coercive power was imposed on the weak, the politically and socially undesirable, and especially, on the colonized, under the guise of disease prevention." -- Andrew Wear, Wellcome Hist of Medicine, London, in The Times Literary Supplement June 19, 1998.

Despite Watts' aversion to Eurocentric scholarship, his mastery of six centuries of Western-influenced infectious disease and sanitation history is impressive. He also writes with authority about the pre-modern and modern medical profession. -- The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Claire Panosian

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (December 22, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300070152
• ISBN-13: 978-0300070156
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,780,019 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An excellent treatise, marred by lapses into indignation, August 20, 1999

By A Customer

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.

53 of 62 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Anti-imperialist screed, January 20, 2000

By	Kenton A. Hoover (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars From a different point of view, October 4, 2005

By	Proteus (Athens, Greece) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism (Paperback)

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.