Laura Spinney - Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 & How it Changed the World

It is impossible to know how many people died from Spanish Flu in 1918. Estimates go as high as 100 million, a number that is incomprehensible. As I write this review official confirmation that total deaths from Covid-19 have surpassed three million, a figure that serves to illustrate the scale of the 1918 pandemic. Reading Pale Rider in 2021 it is hard not to look for parallels to the Covid-19 outbreak. There are many - from debates over whether or not children should be in school, to the different national approaches to quarantine. These parallels are fascinating, though they are not the main reason the book should be read. Influenza is a different disease to Coronaviruses, so parallels are important, but not the only thing we should spot.

More important is the way that Spinney's book draws out the way that the 1918 pandemic hit along lines of class, racism and colonial division. The very name of the disease arises out of the way that the warring nations kept news about disease hidden, and only neutral Spain told the truth. But the disease was spread by soldiers travelling too and from the front - perhaps even brought to Europe by American troops heading to the trenches. It reached Australia after their successful initial quarantine kept out the first peak, but returning soldiers were let in. Hundreds of thousands died.

However Spinney doesn't neglect regions outside of Europe - a problem that often occurs when the Spanish Flu is discussed. There is a heart-breaking chapter about how the Flu destroyed whole communities in Alaska, leaving hundreds of orphans. Chapters on China and India are heart-breaking for the sheer scale of the devastation. And repeatedly we see that those who are poor, lack health-care and quality food die harder and in greater numbers than the rich. A case in point is from the wealthy areas of Paris. As Spinney explains:

Statisticians were foxed by their observation that the highest death rates in the French capital were recorded in the wealthiest neighbourhoods, until they realised who was dying there. The ones coughing behind the grand Haussmannian facades weren't the owners... but the servants... They worked fifteen-to-eighteen-hour days and often had to share their sleeping spaces with other servants... a quarter of all the women who died in Paris were maids.

The disease spread along the routes of capital - railways, shipping and transport - and may have played a roll in shaping some of the struggles that emerged against capitalism after World War One. Spinney notes the influence the disease had on the Indian Independence struggle for instance, the Russian Revolution and other social conflicts. However this bits were the weakest part of the book. I didn't feel particularly convinced of the argument that the disease "changed the world". However the author is much better when exploring the details of disease and society. This is where the lessons for today come from.

Spinney's history of the scientific battle to understand disease, viruses and vaccines is important and well written. However it is the parallels with today that will haunt readers, and her conclusions that emphasise the importance of social health care, funding and education. She notes:

The Spanish flu and subsequent pandemics demonstrated that, given the right incentives and training, health workers stay at their posts and honour their duty to treat, often at great risk to their personal safety. That work force therefore needs to be supported as much as possible and cared for in the event of illness. The best way to support them is to arm them with effective methods of surveillance and prophylaxis, and to make sure that they are dealing with an informed, compliant public. All three areas have seen huge advances since 1918, but there is still room for improvement.

She concludes, following a discussion about the moral of mandatory health measures (she points out that these don't work very well) that:

But if disease containment works best when people choose freely to comply, then people must be informed about the nature of the disease and the risk it poses. This is one reason why it's important to tell the story of the Spanish flu. 

It's certainly one reason I read this book. Unfortunately perhaps it wasn't read widely enough in the brief period after its publication and the arrival of Covid-19.  While demonstrating that disease (and medicine) are shaped by the reality of capitalist society, this is no call for revolution. Nonetheless Laura Spinney's book is engaging, detailed and sharp on the interaction between disease and society through a historical lens. Let us hope that lessons are drawn from this tragedy to prevent the three million deaths becoming just part of a much greater tragedy. 

Related Reviews

Wallace - Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of Covid-19
Harrison - Contagion: How Commerce has Spread Disease
Wallace - Big Farms Make Big Flu
Malm - Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the 21st Century
Davis - The Monster Enters
Quammen - Ebola: The Natural and Human History

Rob Wallace - Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of Covid-19

Back in February 2020 when Covid-19 was just beginning to make headlines I lost count of the number of times I was asked by fellow left-wing activists to recommend a book on capitalism and disease. My answer was always Rob Wallace's book Big Farms Make Big Flu. Published in 2016, those of us who had read it were a little forewarned and forearmed for coronavirus. Reviewing it back then I wrote the book warned us that pandemic was "very much a question of not if, but when". 

While I was recommending his earlier book, Wallace himself was being bombarded with requests for interviews, articles and speaking engagements. Out of that came this excellent new book. Dead Epidemiologists is a collection of material that grapples with the big questions around Covid-19 - its origins, the failure of capitalist governments to deal with it and the way the disease exacerbates existing social, political and economic fractures in society. 

Wallace explains the mindset behind the book:

The reactionary bent to disease control left and right has since pivoted me to assisting efforts in anti-capitalist agricultures and conservation. Let's stop the outbreaks we can't handle from emerging in the first place. At this point in my career, with the structural pacing the emergencies, I generally write about infectious diseases in only tangential terms.

It's not surprising. Given an extensive disease shopping list that begins "African swine fever, Campylobacter, Cryptosporidium, Cyclospora, Ebola, E. coli O157:H7" and finishes with a potpourri of initials, H1N1, H1N2v, N3N2v, H9N2 etc, Wallace points out that:

near-nothing real was done about any of them. Authorities spent a sigh of relief upon each reversal and immediately took the next roll of the epidemiological dice, risking a snake eyes of maximum virulence and transmissibility.

And here we are. This week the stock markets have rallied at the prospect of multiple vaccines coming online, and politicians are breathing sighs of relief as they recklessly anticipate being out of danger at some point soon. But nothing fundamentally has changed. The root causes of disease spillover and the structural problems in capitalist society that means that future pandemics are both likely ("not if, but when") and deadly, have not gone away. Wallace again:

Agribusiness ever turns us toward a techno-utopian future to keep us in a past bounded by capitalist relations. We are spun round and round the very commodity tracks selecting for new diseases in the first place.

These arguments are the key part of the book. Wallace skewers the idea that when it comes to disease the problem is simply the genetic makeup of different viruses. Rather it is about the circuits of capital. The flows of commodities and money, a system where corporations diversify by investing in housing and pig farms to make money from both, encouraging the creation of disease with one hand and the conditions for disease spread with the other. Big agriculture drives deforestation, it helps concentrate reservoirs of animals and disease in smaller areas, encouraging their spread and evolution. Capitalism creates concentrations of animals in vast numbers; thousands of cattle, tens of thousands of pigs, millions of chickens - the perfect petri dish to evolve new strains of disease and the opportunity to leap to human hosts. It does so because this is how to accumulate vast profits. 

The answer is obvious. Pull the rug from under the multinationals. Protect the forests, "reintroduce the livestock and crop diversities and reintegrate animal and crop farming", allow farm animals to "reproduce on site, restarting natural selection that allows immune evolution to track pathogens in real time.... stop treating nature and community... as just another competitor to be run off by the market".

It's a compelling vision, but one that won't come about through signing a few petitions and donating to some kindly NGOs. Instead "people must walk through the door of a global clash with capital and its local representatives... however much any individual foot soldier of the bourgeoisie... attempts to mitigate the damage."

That's the hard bit. But its a conclusion that cannot be ignored. For two reasons. Firstly, as Wallace points out "agribusiness is at war with public health. And public health is losing" but, more dangerously, the capitalists see the crisis as an opportunity. 

There's a disturbing part in Dead Epidemiologists that shows how this happens. Disease kills off a few million animals and then the capitalists move in to fill the space and grab the money. When Donald Trump deployed the Defence Production Act in Summer 2020 he did so for the meat industry (but not, as Wallace cynically points out for PPE production). The meatpacking industry, which had been and continues to be the epicentre of local outbreaks of Covid-19, was protected in order to allow "Big Hog's access to a bullish China market that lost half its domestic pig supply last year to African swine fever". They really will fiddle while we feverishly burn up.

Industrial agriculture is a driver of disease, and much else. Wallace talks about regenerative alternative agriculture. But he also points out that the food system as a whole is at fault. The US coronavirus outbreak began in big, globally connected, cities. But among rural areas through a "vast commodity trade":

However mechanized the value chain, there are people interacting with each other all along the way. Food commodities are the means by which even the most isolated county can be linked into global epidemiologies.

Reading media reports of disease outbreaks in meatpacking plants in the US and UK, we know this is true. The Defence Production Act forced workers back into work, and they got sick while the bosses got richer and richer. The cynicism is appalling; "under the guise of an emergency the administration... allowed poultry plant lines to speed up to rates that require workers to bunch closer together not farther apart."

While lack of union organisation and management callousness in the face of requests for PPE makes the spread of Covid-19 much easier, it is the capitalist need to continuously accumulate more wealth that prevents even a temporary break in the chain of trade and commodity production taking place.  

Wallace never loses sight that Coronavirus is a crisis for ordinary people. Capitalism has created the conditions where pandemics are both more likely, and more deadly. It has ensured that those that suffer first and most are the poorest, in both the Global South and North.

But Wallace also reminds us that there is a force in society who can challenge this and build an alternative society. The migrant workers in America's food industry, the peasants of Asia and South America, the meatpackers, lorry drivers and supermarket workers who are part of a global food system are also the very people who can rebuild it from the bottom up. 

Once again, in this excellent readable polemic, Rob Wallace has shown us the problem and the alternative. We now need to act.

Related Reviews

Wallace - Big Farms Make Big Flu
Malm - Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the 21st Century
Davis - The Monster Enters
Quammen - Ebola: The Natural and Human History
Harrison - Contagion: How Commerce has Spread Disease
Horton - The Covid-19 Catastrophe: What's gone wrong and how to stop it happening again

Mark Harrison - Contagion: How Commerce has Spread Disease

Those people who returned home from coronavirus hotspots during 2020 and entered quarantine for two weeks to hopefully avoid spreading Covid-19 to family, friends, colleagues might have been interested to know that the term 'quarantine' has a long pedigree. It's origins are in 1397 when the Republic of Ragussa (Dubrovnik) allowed for the "detention" of ships for "up to forty days" to prevent the plague spreading into their area.

It's an interesting snippet of information that reminds us that humans have long lived with the threat from disease and have come up with ways to prevent its spread. As civilisation developed humans encountered new diseases and spread existing ones. As trade became an integral part of societies and different, previously isolated groups of people came into contact, diseases travelled on the ships, in the trade goods and crucially, on the humans and animals.

Mark Harrison's book is a history of the close links between commerce and disease. The Covid-19 crisis has shown how modern society, where travel is no longer limited to a few traders or soldiers, has exacerbated the ability of diseases to become pandemics. The speed of airlines has meant that people can arrive at their destinations long before the symptoms become visible. But this isn't new. As caravans gave way to oceanic sailing ships and thence to steam vessels, the same process scared contemporaries.

The awareness of close links between commerce and disease spread aren't new either. In the 14th century people "distrusted" merchants and traders because they associated them with spreading disease, particularly the plague. The Bishop of Rochester, England saw plague in 1375 as being due to traders who each "studies to deceive the next man". Ironically the Bishop had hit upon a key problem that would undermine efforts to stop or contain disease over the coming centuries. The fact that those whose livelihoods depended on moving people and goods would frequently seek to undermine quarantine or restrictions in order to make their money - even at the risk to thousands of lives.

Even in pre-capitalist eras, the interests of commerce whoever weren't just limited to those of individuals, but were bound up with those of nation states. By the 1660s, with the early development of capitalism, the Dutch Republic and England were already engaged in "tit for tat" quarantines designed to undermine each others economies under the guise of protecting health. Officials might lie to prevent "disruption to commerce" as was the case in 1720 when plague arrived in Marseilles, France. Officials at Livorno declared sick men on board a ship bound for the French port as suffering from a fever, not plague. Merchants involved in trade with the Levant were critical of plague restrictions "which cost them dearly through delays, fees and the damage of goods by fumigation".

One of the most fascinating aspects to Harrison's book is how he shows that ideas of how to prevent diseases spreading became ideologically charged. Opposition to quarantine became closely linked to those who promoted free trade, for instance. As Harrison points out: 

Politics, commerce and medicine were becoming closely intertwined. In the heady atmosphere of the 1780s and 1790s many reformers - not least medical practitioners - began to portray quarantine as a relic of a less enlightened and brutal age.

Echoes of this reoccur today. Politicians are desperate to reopen economies after lockdowns, or stop quarantines to prevent damage to the travel and holiday industries. Those who were willing to sacrifice lives in 2020 through herd immunity shared a world-view with those who saw quarantine as an obstacle to commerce in the era of the corn laws. 

Before 1840 most British politicians and most of the British public did not wish to see the nation's quarantine laws repealed or even significantly relaxed. Despite the gloss of liberalism, those who pressed vigorously for the abolition of quarantine tended to be regarded as exponents of vested interests who were prepared to sacrifice the public's health for selfish gain.... but from the mid-1840s there was a significant change, with opposition to quarantine becoming more respectable and more widespread.

In part this was tied up with discussions about how best to deal with disease and new insights into how diseases spread - especially the peculiarities between different diseases. There was also not a touch of racism to imperial views of the world outside of Europe as being dirty, dangerous and unhygienic, compared to the modern industrial nations. Colonialism, imperialism and racism combined with the drive to make a profit that coloured attitudes to fighting sickness. 

In this context the series of international conferences that took place through the 19th and 20th centuries to discuss responses to diseases and try and agree global approaches to disease spread tended to be shaped by what Harrison calls "sanitary imperialism". He contrasts the "theatre for imperial rivalry" at European sanitary conferences with those in Pan-America, where the interests of the US dictated the course of events. It is a process that continues into the 21st century with international agreements about disease often being distorted by the interests of the most powerful nations.

Following the collapse of Communism and the globalisation era, with massive volumes of goods being transported globally and supply chains spanning continents the potential for disease to spread became huge: "Global cities have been linked by a chain of infections ranging from multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis to SARS, while the long-distance trade in animals threatens to spread new strains of influenza and other pathogens capable of crossing between species". 

The contradictions are brought out in a useful section about BSE, where Harrison shows how different commercial interests drove nation states into conflict with others about the export of beef. Laws that should have been about protecting citizens for disease because weapons in tit for tat revenge for bans on imports. He also shows how this has the potential to become an issue for working people as in South Korea were a massive wave of protests and strikes were initiated as the President was seen to be soft on US interests and allow potentially dangerous beef into the country.

If Harrison's sections on the diseases of the globalised era - Sars, Bird Flu and so on - seem to downplay the potential for disease, its possibly on because of hindsight from the Covid-19 era. For Harrison the main question is how and when quarantine is most useful in stopping disease. Rightly he argues that decisions cannot be made by those with vested interests, but must be based on collective global governance. 

Harrison's book is interesting, though it is a somewhat dry read, packed with detail that often obscures rather than clarifies. One problem I did identify is that Harrison tends to see commerce as being an unchanging thing - essentially the same today as it was in the 14th century. As such he doesn't really explore the way that capitalism has changed our relations to nature and made pandemics more likely. There's only a little on how the concentration of animals in massive feedlots has made outbreaks more likely. Instead the author focuses on the trade and movement of commodities, not the system that produces them. 

The problem is that it is the nature of production under capitalism that both undermines attempts to prevent disease spread and encourages the emergence of new diseases through deforestations, industrial agriculture and so on. We need to talk about more than just "commerce". That said, Mark Harrison's book is one of the few that appeared before the Covid-19 pandemic that offers insights into what has taken place and what needs to be done. For those on a "deep dive" into disease reading it should certainly be on the list.

Related Reviews

Horton - The Covid-19 Catastrophe
Davis - The Monster Enters
Malm - Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency

Richard Horton - The Covid-19 Catastrophe: What's gone wrong and how to stop it happening again

Richard Horton is the influential editor of The Lancet, perhaps the most important medical journal in the world. He has been a vocal commentator through the Covid-19 pandemic, a critical thorn in the side of the British government and an important source of news for the lay person. Despite the fact that we are still in the midst of the "catastrophe" of his book's title, what he has to say deserves a wide readership. There are lessons here for future pandemics, as well as guidance for what we should be doing to survive the one we are already in.

Horton begins with the origin story of Covid-19. Here he focuses less on the origins of the virus itself - that's a story that's told well in Andreas Malm's book that I recently reviewed. Instead he looks at how the disease was first identified and how it spread. Reading Horton's brief account of coronavirus' spread around the globe I realised I had forgotten how quickly events unfolded in early 2020. Within weeks the disease had gone from infecting a handful of people in a food market in Wuhan to full-on pandemic. Something even Trump acknowledged on March 17th. 

But while we watched the events unfold on social media and websites that updated statistics in near real time, Horton explains how governments, particularly in the UK and the USA did little to prepare us. He highlights how the Chinese medical system was incredibly open with its information and knowledge - after a brief attempt by authorities to shutdown whistle-blowers. While the success of the Chinese in cautiously lifting lockdown after ten weeks led us to believe we'd have a similar short experience, in fact, there's no doubt that many politicians clearly believed that superior medical technology, better government and large multinational corporations would mean that we'd do better than the Chinese. 

Horton is certainly no apologist for the Chinese state. He makes the point that the "Chinese government owes the world a more detailed explanation of what took place in Wuhan... We need to know so that we have the best chance of preventing it from happening again". But he also says:

Chinese scientists and health workers deserve our gratitude. I know from my own knowledge of these dedicated individuals that they worked tirelessly to understand the nature of this pandemic. They made it their duty to inform WHO when they were sure there was reason to signal global alarm. And, in my dealings with Chinese scientists and policymakers, I have observed nothing less than an extraordinary commitment to collaborate openly and unconditionally to defeat this disease.

Highlighting this is important. Donald Trump made great political play out of arguing exactly the opposite. In barely concealed racist language he blamed the Chinese, the WHO and anyone else he could for the disease. His rants covered up the fact that his administration was doing nothing.

While there was much to learn from China's experience, Trump and the British government failed to heed the lessons. But they also failed to learn from their own planning. In 2016 Exercise Cygnus modelled an influenza outbreak in the UK for the government,. One of the chief scientific advisors to the government commented that "we learnt what would help, but did not necessarily implement those lessons".

In fact the only concern of the British government seemed to be moving back to business as usual as soon as possible. As Horton points out:

In the UK, just three weeks into its lockdown, public debate was already focusing on an exit strategy. But, without either a vaccine to confer immunity or adequate capacity to test, trace and isolate contacts, the prospects for an early exist were nothing more than speculation mixed with touches of fantasy and delusion.

Writing this during Lockdown 2 we can attest to the singular failure of this strategy. Horton points to the confusion at the heart of British government:

As March [2020] proceeded, government ministers became increasingly anxious. But they were still unable to act decisively. Their staccato decision-making suggested an atmosphere of mounting confusion and fear. On 16 March the public was advised to cease non-essential travel. On 18 March schools were closed. And on 20 March, entertainment venues, bars and restaurants were shut. It took until 23 March for the 'stay at home' order to be issued. Critical time had been lost.

Tragically part of the problem were the scientific advisers. Horton says that "they too did too little, too late". He continues:

In the UK, the government had the services of some of the most talented researchers in the world on which to draw. But somehow there was a collective failure to recognise the signals that Chinese and Italian scientists were sending. The UK had the opportunity and the time to learn from the experience of other countries. For reasons that remain not entirely clear, the UK missed those signals and missed those opportunities.

I write this the day after the UK passed 50,000 Covid related deaths. Many (most?) of those should not have died. Horton might argue that the reasons are not entirely clear, but I suggest that many of the problems lie in part in the government's belief in the free market and its consequent hope that a vaccine would be found quickly. In passing it might be worth noting the close links between this approach and that of neoliberal governments seeking to respond to climate change. But the main reason is that Boris Johnson et al, were committed all the way through events to following the path that was most beneficial to business.

Horton cautions that we don't simply see Covid as a disease, but as something at the "meeting of biology and biography" a concept he attributes to the French sociologist Didier Fassin. It is worth remembering this. Pandemics are not simply experienced as illnesses, but are changed, multiplied and redirected according to the fractures and fissures of society - another parallel to climate change. Lockdowns, as Horton points out, haven't just been deployed to try and stop the spread of disease, but they've also led to mental health crises, increased domestic violence and child maltreatment. The UN estimates at least 15 million more cases of domestic violence as a result of lockdown so far.

But Covid also points to something else, an "opportunity to rethink the ethical basis of society". Capitalism, Horton notes has "weaknesses that contributed to the tragic toll of deaths". Might we "seize a moment to redefine our values...to our wellbeing over our wealth"? Its certainly a laudable hope. The Marxist in me would have to point out that doing this would mean a revolutionary challenge to capitalism itself, and I'm not sure that Horton is going that far yet.

Written in the midst of pandemic this short book packs a great deal of punch. It skewers the collective failures of governments and politicians and celebrates the frontline health workers and scientists who've sacrificed their energy and sometimes their lives, to trying to stop the disease. But it also shows that we live in a broken system that is unable to respond to disease. There are many lessons to be learnt from Covid-19 and Richard Horton's book is an extremely good place to start.

Related Reviews

Davis - The Monster Enters
Malm - Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency

Andreas Malm - Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the 21st Century

Andreas Malm's 2016 book Fossil Capital was an important exploration of how capitalism developed into a fossil fuel system. In explaining fossil fuel capitalism Malm placed the question of human labour alongside that of energy and thus showed that the central question for environmentalists was anti-capitalist politics. His 2017 The Progress of this Storm was a polemical defence of Marxist politics for the struggle against fossil capital. With his latest book Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency Malm argues that the twin crises of Covid-19 pandemic and climate change demand an "ecological Leninism" that can wield "War Communism" in order to end capitalism and reconstruct a world where accumulation doesn't drive disease spillover and environmental breakdown.

It's a tour-de-force that asks difficult questions and doesn't shirk from giving difficult answers. Malm begins by asking a relatively simple question which has troubled the minds of many environmentalists since Coronavirus exploded across the globe: "Why did the states of the global North act on corona but not on climate?" Malm shows that there are many answers, some of which are simple (Trump doesn't believe in climate change) others more plausible (acting on climate change is 'bewilderingly complex'). But none of them stand up to scrutiny because, as Malm points out the answer lies in understanding the nature of the system itself.

Simply put, with all their limitations and failures, governments were prepared to temporarily shutdown their system to deal with Covid-19. But acting on climate change required action on a whole different level. Covid-19 did not, as Malm eloquently puts it, "emanate directly from the chimneys of accumulation" like carbon dioxide does. CO₂ is the direct resultant of capitalist accumulation in a fossil fuel system and thus "there are interests at stake in its continued release". So,

an enemy of higher order must be overcome, and not for a month or a year or two: the shutdown of fossil capital would have to be permanent. 

And this requires "a more thoroughgoing breakdown of private property" one that would "bury forms of capital for good. It would be something more akin to war communism".

But the question of the different treatment of the Covid and climate change should not blind us to an important reality. Malm points out that both crises have their origins in capitalism. The first half of the book is a devastating critique of how capitalism drives pandemics. There are multiple ways that this happens. The principle one is the transformation of land use by agribusiness. There are a myriad of ways that this can drive potential spillover - the process, known to scientists as Zoonosis - whereby disease leaps boundaries from one small reservoir among wild animals into domestic animals and thence onto humans. One of these, and one that I'd not considered, is the hunting of bushmeat - which Malm points out is actually driven by elite consumption. Another is the way biodiversity lose can concentrate the potential for disease evolution. But most importantly there's the question of deforestation. 

We should be very clear that it is deforestation driven by the interests of big business that is the biggest problem and the biggest driver of disease. As Malm explains:

In the new millennium, it is the production of commodities that chews up tropical forests. It negates diversity on every front. No more than four commodities - beef, soybean, palm oil and wood products, in descending order of impact - accounted for four tenths of the dramatically sped-up tropical deforestation between 2000 and 2011.

Quoting Marxist writer Rob Wallace, Malm points out that "'opening the forests to global circuits of capital' is in itself 'a primary cause' of all this sickness." 

Those of us in and around the environmental movement in the 1980s and 1990s will recall that opposition to deforestation was the principal issue motivating campaigners in those decades. But despite this deforestation accelerated in the decade afterward. Those campaigns ("buy an acre of the amazon" or "sign this letter") in the 1980s failed to stop deforestation in any way. It's a point that Malm could have made to emphasise his central point - that without a challenge to capital we are lost in preventing environmental collapse or the emergence of future pandemics.

What is the answer? Here Malm raises what is likely to be the most controversial aspect to his book - ecological Leninism and War Communism. But, and I think this is tremendously importance, Malm is placing Leninist theory and practice at the heart of discussions about what to do. He begins by raising an argument that Lenin made in September 1917. In the midst of World War One, Lenin pointed out that everyone recognised that Russia faced disaster, but no-one, except the Bolsheviks were prepared to do what was necessary - lead a revolution. The problem for everyone else is that they wanted to leave the system intact, but it was the system that was causing war, famine, poverty and rebellion.

Similarly those who (on the left as well as the right) who say that the answer to Covid is a vaccine and  better healthcare or put their faith in geo-engineering and sustainable technology, are making the same mistake. Humanity will survive Covid-19 on this strategy. But Covid-21 or 22 is just around the corner. Similarly trying to fix climate change within a fossil fuel capitalism is also impossible as there's no way (as Malm shows) of extracting CO₂ from the air and making a profit. The only solution to more pandemics and climate change is a challenge to the system.

Lenin's practice then, of "turning the crises of symptoms into a crises of the causes" is apposite here. And in doing so, we have to abandon the utopianism of some on the radical left. Malm challenges those anarchists who say that the problem is the state, by making the point that what Covid shows is that a state that can plan, offer healthcare, mandate shutdowns and, presumably protect jobs, income and welfare, is absolutely required. Here then is the War Communism of the title. Its a state system that directly takes on the polluters and the deforesters. Its a system that can implement the urgent changes that are needed to stop future spillovers and act on climate change. It won't be easy, but as Malm points out:

As any transition is hard to conceive without popular-democratic ferment, tensions along a vertical axis may ensue. All this is, of course, prely in the realm of speculation, but we now face the more imminent problem of authoritarian degeneration in periods of symptomatic treatment such as lockdown. Some bourgeois states - those on the far right - will have no compunctions about extending their repressive powers towards proto-fascism. 

"The future", Malm continues is

ecological war communism, in a figurative sense, this being 'only an analogy - but an analogy very rich in content'. It means learning to live without fossil fuels in no time, breaking the resistance of dominant classes, transforming the economy for the duration, refusing to give up even if all the worst-case scenarios come true, rising out of the ruins with the force and the compromises required, organising the transitional period of restoration, staying with the dilemma.

The lessons of Leninism aren't just about revolution and organisation of course. Malm touches on the importance that the fledgling Communist state gives to the protection of nature, a choice whose legacy means that Russia today still has the largest areas of untouched nature in the world.

This book was written early in the first wave of Covid-19. I read it in the early stages of the UK's second wave. While the material is frightening, the clarity of politics at the heart of Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency, was a breath of hope. The challenge for all of us is to rebuild the political organisations that can drive through the change that is required. Andreas Malm's book provides ammunition for that struggle. Its a task we cannot fail at.

Related Reviews 

Malm - The Progress of This Storm: Nature & Society in a Warming World
Malm - Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming
Foster - Marx's Ecology
Burkett - Marx and Nature
Angus - Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the crisis of the Earth System
Dawson - Extinction: A Radical History
Dawson - People's Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons

Mike Davis - The Monster Enters

Those of us who read Mike Davis' The Monster at Our Door in 2005 were perhaps more mentally prepared for the Covid-19 pandemic than many others. Some of us however spent the intervening years in a state of anxiety, jumping every time a news report (usually buried in the back pages of the newspapers) mentioned a "new strain" or "disease outbreak" somewhere in the world. Sadly Davis' has been proved right. While Covid-19 is not a strain of avian flu, the parallels are terrifyingly apparent to even the casual observer.

This new, updated, expanded and renamed edition of his book begins with Covid-19. Davis shows how in the aftermath of SARS, Ebola and Avian Flu many scientists and a few politicians drew important conclusions about the need for public health responses that both tried to avert disease and plan for pandemics. Unfortunately Davis also, meticulously, shows how the US government in particular undermined and destroyed the limited preparations that had been made. Rightly Davis eviscerates the Trump regime for its disastrous public health policies, but he shows how this response was rooted in earlier politics that saw public health spending as an unnecessary luxury.

In response to the threatened 2005 avian flu pandemic [Californian] Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Democratic leaders of the legislature spent hundreds of millions of dollars to stockpile 2,400 portable ventilators, 50 million respirators and materials to assemble 21,000 additional hospital beds. They also invested in three state-of-the-art 200-bed mobile hospitals that could be up and running within 72 hours... But Schwarzenegger was succeeded by a notorious penny pincher named Jerry Brown, who in 2011 crossed out the annual allocation of $5.8 million to maintain the stockpile... the strategic supplies... were either given away or sold off.

As I write this California has over 600,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19. No doubt those supplies, even with the differences between avian flu and Covid-19, would have been useful. 

But Davis doesn't simply note the horrific mistakes made by governments like Trump's in responding to Covid-19 and failing to heed lessons of the past. He shows how a much more thorough-going solution was needed if further pandemics were to be prevented. Indeed, the central theme of the book was how the neo-liberal driven industrial agricultural model (particularly in SE Asia, but also in Africa, Europe and the Americas) was the driver of disease and pandemics.

What was needed was fundamental change:

Permanent bio-protection against new plagues... would require more than vaccines. It would need the suppression of these 'structures of disease emergence' through revolutionary reforms in agriculture and urban living that not large capitalist or state-capitalist country would ever willingly undertake... As [Rob] Wallace emphasised a few years ago, "the agroeconomic impacts of global neoliberalism are foundational, felt across biocultural organisation, down so far as the virion and molecule.

One of the reasons I've spent the intervening years between first publication of Davis' book and the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in a state of anxiety is the knowledge that there has been no attempt to challenge the 'structures of disease emergence' inherent to industrial agriculture. Indeed, exactly the opposite has happened.

The problem, as Davis ably details, is that challenging these "structures" means challenging powerful corporate interests and the states that rule in their name. Behind the threat of avian flu pandemics lie the massive corporations that produce enormous quantities of chickens through the concentration of millions of birds in factory farming. The media and Trump inspired anti-Chinese feelings imply these are an Asian problem (when they bother to look at the role of industrial farming at all) but the problem of this model of farming is global, and is related to a model that puts profits before people, animals and planet. In fact Davis' analysis of the avian flu crisis shows how corporate power actually made government and medical responses worse as they shifted the blame onto small producers rather than change the massively profitable behaviour of the big factory farms. 

Writing about the enormous Bangkok based agricultural corporation Charoen Poklphand which "figures centrally in the story of H5N1's terrifying return in the winter of 2003-4" Davis writes:

CP senior executive Sarasin Viraphol assured reporters that, although the company would not allow the press to inspect its plants, avian flu was completely absent in Thailand. In fact, as the Bangkok press later reported, the government had been colluding with CP and the other giant poultry producers to conceal the epidemic by paying contract farmers with infected flocks to keep quiet; official deceit gave the big exporters several months to process and sell diseased inventory, as well as to disinfect their plants and institute isolation procedures... Small producers... were left alone to bear the brunt of the epidemic's human and economic costs.

While the situation with Covid-19 is different, its clear that similar priorities today have made the situation worse, and once again the poorest are suffering the most. In particular Davis shows how the contemporary model for drug research, through competing, profit orientated drug multinationals, makes finding a cure or vaccine harder and less likely.

While much of the book focuses on the 2000s and the threat from avian flu (Davis points out that this threat hasn't disappeared at all, only got worse) this book is still important reading. In fact those who read it, and were scared back in 2005 ought to re-read it, if only for the brilliant new opening chapter.

As in all his work, Mike Davis writes eloquently and clearly with a sympathy for ordinary people. His implicit call for us to challenge the status quo in order to prevent further pandemics is the biggest lesson we can take from this book. His clear analysis is a tool to help us understand and change a system that has already condemned millions of people to sickness and death in the interests of profit. One monster has entered the door, but further ones lie waiting outside.

Related Reviews

Davis - The Monster at Our Door (2005)
Davis - Late Victorian Holocausts
Davis - Planet of Slums
Quammen - Ebola: The Natural and Human History
Wallace - Big Farms Make Big Flu
Zinsser – Rats, Lice and History

Kyle Harper - The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease & the End of an Empire

I have to admit that I began by disliking Kyle Harper's Fate of Rome. The initial prejudice was because of Harper's use of Malthusian ideas as the intellectual framework for his discussion of Ancient Rome. Reading a book published in 2017 I was surprised to find big chunky quotes from "Parson Malthus" not least because his ideas have repeatedly been challenged and shown wanting.

Persevering with the book however I began to find much of interest. Harper does not abandon his Malthusian positions, but his study of the impact of environmental change and disease on the Roman Empire has much of interest. Harper argues that the fall of the Roman Empire was the "single greatest regression, in all of human history". This was, he says, the result of the contradictions of the Empire coming together with a period of climate change and disease which repeatedly undermined the Empire's rulers' ability to maintain the system.

There are several interlinked contributing factors. The first of these is the environmental context. Harper argues that the Roman Empire arose in a particularly benevolent environmental era - the Roman Climate Optimum (RCO). The RCO is:

poorly defined in time and nature. The chronological boundaries proposed here, ca. 200 BC - AD 150, are a coarse abstraction imposed on a range of evidence, but not arbitrarily. They allow us to describe a phase of late Holocene climate defined by global forcing patterns and a range of proxies displaying some coherence. Buoyed by high levels of insolation and weak volcanic activity, the RCO was a period of warm, wet and stable climate across much of the vast Roman Empire. 

In other words, the RCO allowed big surpluses of food to be grown, agriculture to expand and there were reduced natural disasters to threaten the early Empire.

However the urban nature of the Roman Empire created disease ecologies. The concentration of large numbers of people, in towns and cities that often overwhelmed the sewage systems provided opportunities for disease to flourish. Without any understanding of how disease spread or germ theory, there was little the Romans could do once disease took hold. The results could be devastating. During the Antonine Plague, a disease that was probably small pox, around seven million people died.

The relationship between climate and disease "is not neat and linear". Harper gives us a few examples of how climate change fed the growth and virulence of disease. But his main thesis is that the Roman Empire had little or no protection against disease when it came, and because it was constantly pushing against a Malthusian limit, the results were always catastrophic. While the Empire saw a series of deadly plagues and outbreaks of disease, it seems that the final nail in the coffin was a series of outbreaks in the 500s. In 544 the plague lead to an "unprecedented fiscal-military crisis". The Roman Empire, hitherto reliant on its massive army was unable to mobilise the troops it needed. The repeated outbreaks of plague undermined the viability of the state itself:

The violence of the initial wave reversed two centuries of demographic expansion int he blink of an eye. Then the persistence of plague for two centuries strangled hopes of recovery. If we imagine... a normal growth rate of 0.1 percent per annum leading into the first wave, 50 percent total mortality in an eastern Roman population of 30,000,000, and thereafter a combination of quick recover rates (0.2 percent per annum) and smaller mortality events (10 percent mortality events every 15 years...), the power of the subsequent amplifications to maintain the population at low levels is apparent.

It is difficult to argue against this scenario. But I want to suggest that things were a little more complicated. One thing that is missing from Harper's book is any real discussion about the limitations of Roman society itself. This was a slave economy - the wealth of the Empire was built, in large part, from the labour of slaves. This was a very real limitation on the ability of the Empire to keep expanding, and caused major internal contradictions. The particular nature of Roman society - its highly urban character - arose from the nature of its productive base. The huge populations mentioned are there because there are lots of slaves in the economy. There is nothing here about the interaction between the different classes - the tensions in the cities that meant Emperors had to constantly think about appeasing the mob, the slave revolts, or the condition of the peasantry. One of the strengths of Mary Beard's recent history of Rome is that she points out that the vast majority of the Roman population worked all their lives until they died. Tensions between those at the bottom of society and the one percent were a constant concern for the ruling classes - yet the nature of Roman society is minimised in the face of the external threat from climate and disease. While it would be wrong to ignore these factors, to reduce the rise and fall of a civilisation simply to them is inadequate. Writing about the barbarian attacks on Rome Harper writes:

We need not go in for monocausal explanations. The coming of the Huns did not, by itself, spell the doom of the western empire. In the end the Huns conquered very little, and the effect of their entrance onto the scene must be measured within the particular circumstance that they encountered.

What is true of the Huns is also true of climate and disease. Their impact must be measured against the nature of Roman society that made it vulnerable. In this Harper's book proves inadequate. The reason for this inadequacy is that Harper's starting point is Malthusian - that every human society faces a brick wall against which it constantly presses, and mass hunger (or ecological crisis) is just around the corner. Karl Marx pointed out that the problem with Malthus was that he ignored the economic and social context. As Marx wrote:

overpopulation is... a historically determined relation, in no way determined by abstract numbers or by the absolute limit of the productivity of the necessaries of life, but by limits posited rather by specific conditions of production. As well as restricted numerically. How small do the numbers which meant overpopulation for the Athenians appear to us!

Despite my disagreement with his thesis, I found much of interest in Harper's book. After finishing it, I read Caesars account of the Conquest of Gaul and I was pleased to note a bit when Caesar complains that the barbarians constantly mock the Romans for their short stature. Harper explains that Roman society was inherently unhealthy. Statistical studies of bones show that the coming of the Empire led to smaller stature. People were taller before and after the Empire, but while it ruled their region they were less healthy and were thus shorter. Such details and Harper's detailed studies of the impact of disease on the Roman Empire are fascinating. But the book is undermined by a weak theoretical framework.

Related Reviews

Beard - SPQR
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Everitt - The First Emperor
Syme - The Roman Revolution
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Rob Wallace - Big Farms Make Big Flu

The media is a fickle beast, so coverage of potential epidemics of diseases veers between the apocalyptic to nonexistence. As an outbreak occurs we hear about the potential terrifying consequences of the disease, combined with graphic details of the symptoms and frequently pictures of large numbers of dead animals.

Rob Wallace's new book is an important polemic that argues that we, as a society, should be a lot more concerned about the potential for disease to decimate the human population. It is very much a question of not if, but when. Wallace's work is important because it argues that the key problem is not inadequate science, nor ineffectual medicine (though at times these may be issues) but an approach to the question which fails to see the systematic way that capitalism has transformed our relationship to the wider eco-system in ways that encourage the spread, mutation and virulence of disease.

Firstly, agribusiness, the huge corporations that dominate global farming today encourage disease. They do this in a number of ways. Farming is vertically integrated - from birth to slaughter animals are brought together in enormous numbers, in single locations. This encourages both the spread of disease and its evolution. Frighteningly, Wallace also notes that research shows that the common response to infection among animals, large scale destruction of the flock or herd, helps to select pathogens to be more virulent, or to target younger animals, both increasingly the likelihood of further outbreaks.

But the real problem is an agricultural system based on profit. Take this example of an out-break in Asia,

The CP Group operates joint-venture poultry facilities across China, producing 600 million of China's 2.2 billion chickens annually sold. When an outbreak of bird flu occurred in a  farm operated by the CP Group in the province of Heilongjiang, Japan banned poultry from China. CP factories in Thailand were able to take up the slack and increase of exports to Japan. In short, the CP Group profited from an outbreak of its own making. It suffered no ill effects from its own mistakes.

As Wallace emphasises though, this is not about humans as such, it's about how agriculture is organised.

The onus must be placed on the decisions we humans made to organize them this way. And when we say "we," let'd be clear, we're talking how agribusinesses have organised pigs and poultry.

It's a theme Wallace returns to frequently

What does it mean to change the use value of the creatures we eat? What happens when changing use value turns out poultry into plague carriers? Does out-of-season goose production, for instance, allow influenza strains to avoid season extirpation, typically a natural interruption in the evolution of virulence? Are the resulting profits defensible at such a rapidly accruing cost?

What Wallace is particularly aiming at is a system that reinvents the world's ecology in a manner that makes disease more likely. Farming is his key concern here, as he puts it "the present agricultural model is farming tomorrow's deadliest pathogens alongside its meat monocultures." But it is also the wider transformation of landscape. In a fascinating discussion of Ebola, Wallace challenges those who simply see it as a question of science, but also those who simply see it as a result of poverty. Instead, Ebola is the consequence of the commodification of rural Africa - the transformation of forests in the interests of agriculture, the changing relationships that people have with the wider natural world. Wallace puts it much better than I can

neo-liberalism's structural shifts are no mere background on which the emergency of Ebola takes place. The shifts are the emergency as much as the virus itself. Changes in land use brought about by policy-driven transitions in ownership and production appear to be fundamental contributions to explaining Ebola's area-specific emergence. Deforestation and intensive agriculture may strip out traditional agroforestry's stochastic friction, which typically keeps the virus from lining up enough transmission.

Wallace is not suggesting that we shouldn't spend money on research, or administer drugs or try and alleviate poverty. What he is trying to do is outline method for scientists and government officials to understand the origins of the root cause of the problem. The reality is though that precisely because agriculture is dominated by huge multinationals, Wallace's warnings are likely to be ignored. This is why its good to see he doesn't ignore the struggles of farmers and agricultural workers to improve things and shows that many farmers are well aware of the limitations of industrial farming. Not least because, as he argues, the aspect of animal agriculture that is least profitable is the bit that the corporations are least interested in - the care and maintenance of the animals themselves. It's also the part that is most risky from a disease point of view. Farmers understand this, and they also know that the system is stacked against them as the corporations and banks collude to maximise profits at the expense of livelihoods.

Wallace's book is a detailed and at times difficult read. It originates mostly as articles he has written for his website Farming Pathogens and hence contains a lot of scientific terms and concepts, some of which were incomprehensible to the interested lay-reader and most of which received little explanation. Because the book originates in essays and talks given elsewhere there is some repetition, but I felt what was missing most was a concluding chapter that summarised the author's arguments and offered a clear strategy aimed at the lay-person. That said, for readers interested in capitalism, ecology and wider environmental questions there is much to be gained from this fascinating, if terrifying book.

Related Reviews

Quammen - Ebola
Davis - The Monster at our Door
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Zinsser - Rats, Lice and History

David Quammen - Ebola: The Natural & Human History

The Ebola crisis that raged over the summer produced acres of newsprint. Much of it was sensationalist, inaccurate and confusing. Many people were concerned, not least because of irresponsible reporting. Some were quick to point out that the media only became interested when white people in rich nations started dying and Socialist Worker highlighted the way that "The Rich Could Stop Ebola in a Day".

Ebola is a horrible, virulent disease. But despite it having first identified following a 1976 outbreak, we still know very little about it. One reason for that, as Socialist Worker highlighted, is the lack of resources that have been spent on solving the problem. Another is the particular way that Ebola spreads.

David Quammen's new book concentrates on this second question. His book has its origins in a 2012 book of his, Spillover which examined the way that diseases can arrive from the animal kingdom and enter the human population. The Ebola pathogen is a zoonosis, "an animal infection that is transmissible to humans". Quammen points out that this is not uncommon - diseases like bubonic plague or rabies are zoonosis.

The reason that this is important is that identifying the "reservoir" animal which carries Ebola between outbreaks is a key part in identifying how to deal with the disease. The reservoir is unknown, though recently it has become clear that bats may well have a key role in this. Bats are extremely common in areas where Ebola outbreaks occur.  However at the time of writing, Quammen acknowledges that no bat has ever been found, despite extensive research, containing live Ebola viruses. This might mean that bats are part of a much more complex Ebola ecology (we know for instance that Ebola is particularly virulent in Gorillas) or it may be that some bats are the reservoir. More research is needed.

Ebola usually causes a horrible death. Though when the communities are in Africa we rarely hear about them, which was why I was surprised to find out from Quammen's book that 1976 was the first known case of an outbreak. I was also surprised to learn that several casualties have occurred outside of Africa long before the 2014 outbreak. England had a patient in 1976 who had contracted it due to an injury while studying the disease. A Russian researcher who had been looking at an experimental therapy derived from blood serum of horses died in 1996. Injecting live horses with Ebola must have been a particularly dangerous piece of research activity.

I was fascinated to discover that an African group, the Acholi, had, as part of their cultural knowledge, "a program of special behaviours" some of which seem specifically aimed at coping with diseases like Ebola. Including "quarantining each patient... relying on a survivor of the epidemic (if there were any) to provide care to each patient; limiting movement of people between the affected village.... not eating rotten or smoked meat; and suspending the ordinary burial practices"

Most importantly though, Quammen locates the Ebola question in the wider social context. He points out for instance, that there are other, far more dangerous diseases (malaria, or TB), others that could well evolve and cause extensive destruction (bird flu). There are others that cause localised epidemics, that are ignored in the west. All of these would benefit from proper funding, and are made worse by Africa's general poverty and the legacy of western colonialism. As Quammen points out: 

What we should remember, is that the events in West Africa (so far) tell us not just about the ugly facts of Ebola's transmissibility and lethality; they tell us also about the ugly facts of poverty, inadequate health care, political dysfunction, and desperation in three West African countries, and of neglectful disregard of those circumstances over time by the international community.

Quammen's book is not perfect, its main limitations come from its origin in a book with a slightly different emphasis. But it is an excellent introduction to Ebola. It should also encourage us to demand that our governments spend more of researching diseases like Ebola and caring for their victims.

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Zinsser - Rats, Lice and History
Ziegler - The Black Death

Philip Ziegler - The Black Death

The Black Death decimated the population of the medieval world. The epidemic that hit Europe in the 1340s can be argued to have fundamentally changed the world. While on the surface, the social relations that government the peasant dominated societies were similar before and after, beneath the surface, changes that had started before the plague hit, were being accelerated.

Ziegler's book is an excellent narrative history. In trying to understand how the Black Death changed and shaped the world, he begins by looking at its impact as it proceeded through Europe. The plague had raged with "unparalleled fury" in the East. Rumours reached the major European seaports of a depopulated India, but "it does not seem to have occurred to anyone that the plague might one day strike at Europe". But the Europe wasn't isolated anymore. Trading ships travelled the oceans of the globe and with their cargos, they carried the pests that brought the plague. With grim inevitability, the disease arrived.

The first place to be hit was the great centre of European overseas trade - the port of Genoa in Italy. The disease then spread rapidly westwards, the impact was similar in most European nations. This shouldn't be surprising, there was very little difference between the nations of Europe in those period. while the scale of the suffering sometimes varied, the ineffectual responses were very similar. Religious figures blamed the sins of the people and urged more prayer - though sometimes they were honest enough (at least in private) to admit that this would have little effect. The role of religion is important - not least because it shaped the only real world view that existed in medieval Europe. But also because the church represented the only bureaucracy that could give effective records for the impact of the plague. Statistics for the numbers of deaths in various towns and villages come from church records, but more importantly figures for the numbers of replacement churchmen allow the modern scholar to extrapolate the impact of the disease.

This is important, not least because the medieval chroniclers are renowned for their inaccuracy when it comes to figures. Medieval writings describe deaths of tens of thousands in cities that could not possibly have had these populations. (Similar problems exist in the descriptions of contemporary battles - sizes of armies and casualties routinely don't match reality).

Zieglar settles on a figure that says that approximately a third of Europe's population died. The plague didn't have equal impacts - the rich suffered proportionately less, though no one was spared. Occasionally, in an attempt to find blame, frightened populations massacred those they thought had incurred God's wrath - the Jewish pogroms of the time are well documented and often seemed to have, at least the tacit support of the local establishment.

There were other interesting by-products of the plague, and the inability of the medieval mind to come to terms with what was happening - the Flagellant movement of religious people, who travelled from towns to cities on the continent, whipping themselves in front of crowds being one of these.

The scale of the death was truly shocking - Ziegler points out that "even the front-line infantry man [in the First World War] had a better chance of surviving the war than the medieval peasant the plague." But Ziegler argues that contrary to some schools of thought, the shock to the social system that was the Black Death wasn't enough to usher in the changes that lead to the Peasants Revolt in the early 1380s. Instead he argues, that the Black Death encouraged the social processes - such as the increased numbers of peasants selling their labour - to occur. The shortage of labour after the plague had passed allowed, at least initially, wages to rise.

But the Black Death did shake the medieval world. It helped change the way many viewed the world. As Ziegler says:

The Black Death did not cause the Reformation, it did not stimulate doubts about the doctrine of the Transubstantiation; but did it not cause a state of mind in which doctrines were more easily doubted and in which the Reformation was much more immediately possible?

Because the Black Death had not spared anyone, because the church had been proved ineffectual, some of the most important pillars of society were undermined. As Ziegler concludes, the world was never quite the same again.

Related Reviews

Zinsser – Rats, Lice and History

Davis - The Monster at Our Door - The Global Threat of Avian Flu

Pryor - Britain in the Middle Ages

Hans Zinsser – Rats, Lice and History

Throughout history, on hundreds of occasions, various epidemics decimated the human populations. On many of these occasions the dead have remained uncounted, entire villages and towns have been emptied and very occasionally, the course of history has been changed.

We have become used to the type of history book that focuses on one particular commodity, material or scientific discovery and declaims how it has “changed the world”. In contemporary times, perhaps the first to do this was Longitude, Dava Sobel’s work that examined how the ability to measure distance at sea fundamentally transformed man’s ability to trade and wage war, and thus altered history. Since then, we have seen books claiming that their subject matter is singularly responsible for changing the world. Mark Kurlansky’s books Salt and Cod spring to mind, but there are others, and sooner or later some enterprising author will no doubt write 200 pages on the historical importance of “Dust”. But I digress.

However, many years ago, Hans Zinsser had a similar idea. In 1934, this scientist decided to write a long book which, amongst other things, touched on the shaping of history by Rats and Lice (in particular through their ability to carry and pass on diseases such as Typhus). Zinsser describes his work as a biography of Typhus. But Zinsser is far from a scientist who is limited by his scientific subject. The book starts with a gentle discussion of the ability of scientists to discuss subjects not related to science. It’s an important discussion – should scientists touch the realms of history for instance. Zinsser concludes that they both should and must and energetically goes about doing so, quoting such literary greats as Joyce, Shelley and Eliot along the way.

Zinsser’s style is a wonderful blend of poetic writing and simple science. But he is also very funny. At one point a footnote to the word “saprophyte” tells us that “if the reader does not understand this word, it is too bad” [1].

To understand the history of Typhus we need to learn a little about the spread of disease, how certain diseases love the dirty cramped conditions of human existence and how the medicines that fight them work. We learn also how humans can get disease from animals, and how animals (or insects) can carry these diseases, but not succumb. We also learn how terrible an epidemic really is. This book was written shortly after millions died in the First World War. Millions more died in the great influenza epidemics that followed that conflict.

More interestingly the non-biologist like myself learns that diseases like Typhus have a history of themselves and Zinsser, in those pre-DNA testing times shows us how scientists can show that the disease had evolved down different paths. The different variants having different effects, and different victims. Part of this discussion looks at epidemics in history and Zinsser examines the evidence for whether certain mass deaths described by Pliny or other ancient historians can be attributed to various “modern” diseases.

This is a fabulous work. Science as it should be written, by an author who clearly didn’t think that one should never stray from one’s area of special understanding. But one who also believed that knowledge was important to combat disease. I’ll leave the last words to Zinsser himself:

About the only genuine sporting proposition that remains unimpaired by the relentless domestication of a once free living human species is the war against those ferocious little fellow creatures, which lurk in the dark corners and stalk us in the bodies of rats, mice, and all kinds of domestic animals; which fly and crawl with the insects, and waylay us in our food and drink and even in our love.

[1] The Chambers Scientific and Technological Dictionary actually defines it as “an organism living heterotrophically [2] and osmotrophically on dead organic matter”

[2] if the reader does not understand this word, it is too bad

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