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How scientists saved humanity from the deadliest infectious diseases--and what we can do to prepare ourselves for future epidemics. After the unprecedented events of the COVID-19 pandemic, it may be hard to imagine a time not so long ago when deadly diseases were a routine part of life. It is harder still to fathom that the best medical thinking at that time blamed these diseases on noxious miasmas, bodily humors, and divine dyspepsia. This all began to change on a day in April 1676, when a little-known Dutch merchant described bacteria for the first time. Beginning on that day in Delft and ending on the day in 1978 when the smallpox virus claimed its last known victim,
List of contents
Preface: The Healing
1: What the Draper Saw
2: Deadly Preconceptions
3: Foreign Bodies
4: Precursors
5: Ridiculous Diseases, Inconceivable Ideas
6: Buying the Pox
7: Slaying the Speckled Monster
8: An Angel’s Trumpet
9: The Great Sanitary Awakening
10: Finding Pathogens
11: The Semmelweis Reflex
12: Making Sense of Cholera
13: The Broad Street Pump
14: Louis Pasteur: The Rising
15: The Subtle Foe
16: The Mystery of the Cursed Meadows
17: A New Vaccine
18: The Bible of Bacteriology
19: Defining the Indefinable Something
20: (Re)Discovering Cholera
21: A Sacred Delirium
22: Immunity and the Strangling Angel
23: Deadly Carriers
24: The Beast in the Mosquito
25: Fit for Duty
26: A Pathogen Too Far
27: Midnight Work
28: The Anti-Bacterial Revolution
29: Penicillin
30: Race to the Vaccine
31: Zero Pox
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Endnotes
Index
About the author
Richard Conniff is a National Magazine Award-winning writer for Smithsonian magazine, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and other publications, and a past Guggenheim Fellow. Among his many books are The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth; Swimming with Piranhas at Feeding Time: My Life Doing Dumb Stuff with Animals; The Natural History of the Rich: A Field Guide; and, most recently, House of Lost Worlds: Dinosaurs, Dynasties, and the Story of Life on Earth. Conniff has been a commentator on NPR's Marketplace and a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times.
Summary
How scientists saved humanity from the deadliest infectious diseases and what we can do to prepare ourselves for future epidemics.
