Christian W. McMillen's Reading List

"Faith, Reason, and the Plague is an extraordinary book about a couple of different visitations of the plague in a tiny Tuscan town during the seventeenth century, during a time when ideas about religion were changing. The response to the plague in Tuscany became a fulcrum for debate about whether the clergy should continue to command life beyond church doors. The emerging professional class of doctors and administrators explained concepts like contagion and infection that are obvious to us now, but which were really very new at the time. Cippolla uses court records and other kinds of primary evidence to explore what happened when the plague arrived as science started to challenge the way religion traditionally shaped people’s belief. He does it in about 80 pages of marvellous micro-history . In response to the visitation of disease , this new class of medical professionals and administrators was urging the population to self-quarantine to avoid the spread of infection, while local priests, who largely had control of the population, were saying, ‘This is an act of God; to ward off the plague we need to come together for a mass.’ “In the 19th century, reservations became breeding grounds for infectious diseases like tuberculosis” These forces were completely at odds with one another. One is suggesting, based on empirical evidence, that people need to separate themselves. The other one is saying that to stop the plague we must come together and praise God. Cippolla shows how these questions of faith and reason, as he puts it, created enormous conflicts."

"This book examines how smallpox changed population dynamics from early contact between native people and Europeans in Canada in the 17th century through the end of the 19th century. Daschuk looks at how new mechanisms of hunting, as well as the trade in beaver fur and bison hide, spread disease amongst native people. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter These diseases radically altered social networks and tribal identities across an enormous swath of time and space. In the 19th century, reservations became breeding grounds for infectious diseases like tuberculosis. So, the book shows how early capitalist trade and then sequestration on reservations, led to horrific mortality among native populations, due to infectious diseases that came over with European traders and colonizers Daschuk looks at three alien mechanisms which altered present day Canada. The introduction of the horse allowed people to travel much faster and further. The introduction of European diseases like smallpox were transported faster and further by horse. And the introduction of trade in beaver skins and guns compounded the former two factors. Introducing guns, germs and horses radically altered the lives of native people. They played a synergistic role with one another. For instance, without the horse and without the motivation of trade diseases would likely have been isolated instead of becoming pandemics. All three of these things worked together to cause enormous disruptions, including migrations and reductions in native population."

"The Making of a Tropical Disease looks at the origins of malaria in Africa as people began to settle around water sources and forests began to be cleared. He examines the ways in which migration and agriculture fostered the spread of malaria, through mosquitoes. He takes us all the way through the end of the 20th century, when the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation undertook its sustained effort to eradicate malaria in the developing world. Diseases like smallpox were successfully eradicated. Like tuberculosis, malaria is a disease that is impossible to get rid of without widespread environmental manipulation, including the eradication of mosquitoes. And with global warming, there’s the possibility that malaria will get even worse. This book is far and away the best introduction for anybody seeking to understand malaria’s importance in world history. That’s a good question. I don’t know that they do. The historical consciousness about pandemics is very shallow, unfortunately. In Discovering Tuberculosis , I show there isn’t much historical consciousness in the way that we treat tuberculosis. Drug resistant tuberculosis emerged as a problem in the early 1960s in East Africa, particularly in Kenya. We had the opportunity to deal with the issue of multidrug resistant tuberculosis, but nothing was done. Amnesia about the problem seemed to set in until drug resistance again emerged as a topic of concern in the 1990s, as if it was a new discovery. “Amnesia about the problem seemed to set in until drug resistance again emerged as a topic of concern in the 1990s” In the case of HIV-TB co-infection, it was very clear in the early 1980s that wherever HIV went, TB cases shot up. In the early 1980s, researchers were very interested in thinking about how to treat the two diseases together. But, for a variety of reasons, that research was never fully pursued. Then, in the mid-aughts, co-infection came to the fore, as though it was an epic discovery, even though co-infection was a problem that had been around since the beginning of HIV."

"This is a fascinating book about a pandemic that, about a hundred years ago, was estimated to have caused perhaps as many 100 million deaths worldwide, with almost 700,000 deaths in the U.S. The scale of death was staggering. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The most interesting part of Bristow’s book is that she so clearly shows the ways in which both the medical profession and municipal officials had no idea what they were dealing with. Something like this hadn’t happened before on that scale. Few really understood how viruses worked at the time. Many thought the flu was a bacterial infection, when in fact it was a virus. She shows that the country was caught unaware. People panicked. The pandemic called into question the efficacy of modern medicine. And movingly, Bristow shows how so many Americans dealt with tragedy of losing multiple members of their family. Bristow tries to investigate why an event that killed an enormous portion of the population in a very short period of time and affected every part of the country left so little mark on the American imagination and memory. Far fewer Americans died in World War I , yet we think of it as a keystone American event. Why doesn’t the flu pandemic hold a similar place in the national memory? It’s an interesting question."

"It’s another great little book. One students love when I use it in class and students are always a good barometer for whether a book is palatable. It’s about how yellow fever affected the United States in the mid-to-late nineteenth century and the origins of the outbreaks, which was traced back to Cuba. It brings up lots of interesting questions about what a powerful country can dictate to a less powerful country needs to do to control disease. The other books I selected brought up different elements of epidemics. This one is almost a diplomatic history through the lens of disease. Epidemic invasions shows how pandemics affect trade and diplomatic relations between nations. There are similarities to the relationship between England and India in the nineteenth century vis-à-vis cholera. They have best practices, which are based on prior public health history, but it seems that similar mistakes are still being made. Sorry to sound so cynical, but the lessons of the past don’t seem to be foremost in the minds of those who are handling this pandemic."