‘This splendid and often moving work of history… Schama has a gift for combining novelistically
colourful detail serious analysis and wryly amusing asides’ Daily Telegraph ‘Superb’
Observer ‘Extraordinary… A meticulous retelling of a terrible yet scientifically
innovative period… Makes an urgent case for building a better future on our toxic past’
Guardian ‘This is history of the best sort – humanly engaged but never sentimental’ Mail
on Sunday Cities and countries engulfed by panic and death desperate for vaccines but
fearful of what inoculation may bring. This is what the world has just gone through with
Covid-19. But as Simon Schama shows in his epic history of vulnerable humanity caught between
the terror of contagion and the ingenuity of science it has happened before.
Characteristically with Schama the message is delivered through gripping page-turning stories
set in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: smallpox strikes London cholera hits Paris
plague comes to India. Threading through the scenes of terror suffering and hope – in
hospitals and prisons palaces and slums – are an unforgettable cast of characters : a
philosopher-playwright burning up with smallpox in a country chateau a vaccinating doctor
paying house calls in Halifax a woman doctor in south India driving her inoculator-carriage
through the stricken streets as dead monkeys drop from the trees. But we are also in the labs
when great life-saving breakthroughs happen in Paris Hong Kong and Mumbai. At the heart
of it all an unsung hero: Waldemar Haffkine. A gun-toting Jewish student in Odesa turned
microbiologist at the Pasteur Institute hailed in England as ‘the saviour of mankind’ for
vaccinating millions against cholera and bubonic plague in British India while being
cold-shouldered by the medical establishment of the Raj. Creator of the world’s first mass
production line of vaccines in Mumbai he is tragically brought down in an act of shocking
injustice. Foreign Bodies crosses borders between east and west Asia and Europe the
worlds of rich and poor politics and science. Its thrilling story carries with it the credo of
its author on the interconnectedness of humanity and nature of the powerful and the people.
Ultimately Schama says as we face the challenges of our times together ‘there are no
foreigners only familiars’.
