Plagues and Pandemics

Black Death, Coronaviruses and Other Deadly Diseases of the Past, Present and Future

Douglas Boyd

• Publisher: Pen and Sword History
• Year: 2023
• eBook ISBN: 9781399005210
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: World History

An overview of deadly diseases from throughout world history spanning from prehistoric civilizations to the twenty-first century.
All you need for a plague to go pandemic are population clusters and travelers spreading the bacterial or viral pathogens. Many prehistoric civilizations died fast, leaving cities undamaged to mystify archeologists. Plague in Athens killed 30% of the population 430–426 BCE. When Roman Emperor Justinian I caught bubonic plague in 541 CE, contemporary historian Procopius described his symptoms: fever, delirium and buboes—large black swellings of the lymphatic glands in the groin, under the arms and behind the ears. That bubonic plague killed twenty-five million people around the Mediterranean. Later dubbed Black Death, it killed fifty million people 1346-1353, returning to London forty times in the next 300 years. The third bubonic plague pandemic started 1894 in China, claiming fifteen million lives, largely in Asia, before dying down in the 1950s after visiting San Francisco and New York. But it also hit Madagascar in 2014, and the Congo and Peru. The cause, yersinia pestis was identified in 1894. Infected fleas from rats on merchant ships were blamed for spreading it, but Porton Down scientists have a worrying explanation why the plague spread so fast.
Any disease can go epidemic. Everyday European infections brought to the Americas by Cortes' conquistadores killed millions of the natives, whose posthumous revenge was the syphilis the Spaniards brought back to Europe. The mis-named Spanish flu, brought from Kansas to Europe by U.S. troops in 1918 caused more than fifty million deaths. Fifty years later, H3N2 flu from Hong Kong killed more than a million people.
One coronavirus produces the common cold, for which neither vaccine nor cure has been found, despite the loss of millions of working days each year. Chillingly, historian Douglas Boyd lists many other sub-microscopic killers still waiting for tourism and trade to bring them to us.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Book Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Glossary
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Ancient Plagues
• Chapter 2 Of Cities and Armies
• Chapter 3 What Makes a Pandemic?
• Chapter 4 Research and Regulations
• Chapter 5 A Plethora of Plagues
• Chapter 6 The Great Plague Arrives in England
• Chapter 7 The Plague Progresses
• Chapter 8 Death Goes on Regardless
• Chapter 9 The Great Fire
• Chapter 10 Plague, Typhus, Cholera Take Your Pick
• Chapter 11 Getting to Know the Enemy
• Chapter 12 Sundry Fevers and the Spanish ’flu
• Chapter 13 Covid-19 Emerges
• Chapter 14 Pandemic and Panic
• Chapter 15 Pathogens A-plenty
• Chapter 16 A Pause for Thought
• Appendix
• Acknowledgements
• Further Reading
• Notes and Sources
• Index