The 2014 Ebola epidemic demonstrated the power of pandemics and their ability not only to
destroy lives locally but also to capture the imagination and terrify the world. In 2019 and
the years that followed the coronavirus pandemic infected every continent and took the lives
of millions. In this updated edition Christian W. McMillen provides a concise yet
comprehensive account of pandemics throughout human history illustrating how pandemic disease
has shaped history and at the same time social behavior has influenced pandemic disease.
Extremely interesting from a medical standpoint the study of pandemics also provides
unexpected broader insights into culture and politics. This Very Short Introduction describes
history's major pandemics--plague tuberculosis malaria smallpox cholera influenza and HIV
AIDS--highlighting how each disease's biological characteristics affected its pandemic
development. McMillen discusses state responses to pandemics such as quarantine isolation
travel restrictions and other forms of social control and pays special attention to the rise
of public health and the explosion of medical research in the wake of pandemics especially as
the germ theory of disease emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today
medicine is able to control all of these diseases yet some of them are still devastating in
much of the developing world. By assessing the relationship between poverty and disease and the
geography of epidemics McMillen offers an outspoken and thought-provoking point of view on the
necessity for global governments to learn from past experiences and proactively cooperate to
prevent any future epidemic.
