Volume 30, Number 12 · July 21, 1983
The Plague of Plagues
By William H. McNeill
The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe
by Robert S. Gottfried
Free Press, 203 pp., $16.95
One of the things that separate us from our ancestors and make contemporary experience profoundly different from that of other ages is the disappearance of epidemic disease as a serious factor in human life. Nowadays, if a few score of people die of an infection, officials declare an epidemic, the newspapers are full of it, and medical resources are quickly marshaled to find the source and check the further progress of the disease. The reaction to cases of 'Legionnaires' disease' in Philadelphia was typical. And, of course, the result was to keep the outbreak from spreading. It became a spectator event, not a catastrophe engulfing the whole society.
Review, 2506 words
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