Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues

by Jonathan Kennedy

Over the last couple of years, Covid-19 has affected all our lives to such an extent that it has become a cliché to say that the pandemic is unprecedented and extraordinary. But when we place coronavirus in its historical and scientific context, it becomes very clear that there is little about it that is new or remarkable. Recurring outbreaks of infectious disease have been a feature of human existence for millennia. Epidemics have played a critical role in, among other things, the transformation from a planet inhabited by multiple species of human to one in which Homo sapiens reigned supreme; the replacement of nomadic foraging with sedentary agriculture; the decline of the great empires of antiquity; the rise of new world religions; the transition from feudalism to capitalism; European colonialism; and the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions. In other words, bacteria and viruses have been instrumental in the emergence of the modern world.