Andrew Doig’s gutwrenching descriptions of disease and death serve as background to the larger story of how people began to apply reason to their understanding of illnesses
You might expect a book on this morbid theme to be forbidding or sombre. This one is neither. Instead Mr Doig, a biochemist at the University of Manchester, tells an empowering story of human ingenuity.
The fight against infectious diseases made a step-change around 250 years ago in Europe and North America. Mr Doig devotes chapters to some of the major infections of the medieval era, including bubonic plague, smallpox, typhoid and cholera. His gut-wrenching descriptions of disease and death—stinking, weeping boils, diarrhoea and worse—serve as background to the larger story of how people began to apply reason to their understanding of illnesses.
Such were the respective origins of clinical trials, vaccination, epidemiology and good hygiene. At last, humans were acquiring decisive weapons against infections and, from the mid-19th century, life expectancy began to rise. Death, however, remained inevitable. As some versions of it fade, others take their place.
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