Frank M. Snowden III > Quotes

“Laënnec stressed the importance of emotional shocks and “sad passions” (passions tristes)—grief, disappointed hope, religious zealotry, and unrequited love—that depress the body’s “animal energy.”
― Frank M. Snowden III, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present

“As poorly transmissible as it was, however, SARS exposed the absence of “surge capacity” in the hospitals and health-care systems of the prosperous and well-resourced countries it affected. The events of 2003 thereby raised the specter of what might have happened had SARS been pandemic influenza, and if it had traveled to resource-poor nations at the outset instead of mercifully visiting cities with well-equipped and well-staffed modern hospitals and public health-care systems.”
― Frank M. Snowden III, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present

“British Army officer Sir Jeffery Amherst, who introduced genocide to North America when he deliberately gave blankets infected with smallpox to Native Americans in order to “reduce” them.”
― Frank M. Snowden III, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present

“Lima news magazine, explicitly invoked the comparison in March 1991 when fifteen hundred people were being stricken daily. “Terrifyingly,” it explained, “health conditions in nineteenth-century London were similar to those of Lima today.”
― Frank M. Snowden III, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present

“There are two eras in the modern history of tuberculosis—before and after Robert Koch’s 1882 discovery of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which successfully established the germ theory of disease and demonstrated that tuberculosis is contagious.”
― Frank M. Snowden III, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present

“Soon after meeting Chadwick in person, Dickens began to incorporate the miasmatic and filth theories into his novels, starting with Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–1844) and Dombey and Son (1848), where the concepts are clearly delineated.”
― Frank M. Snowden III, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present

“Consumption lost its allure with the demonstration that it was not a hereditary but an infectious disease.”
― Frank M. Snowden III, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present

“The homeless have high rates of HIV infection because their condition correlates with high-risk behaviors of many kinds, such as exchanging sexual favors for shelter, drugs, or food; lack of sex education; limited access to health care; malnutrition; and a tendency to self-medicate with drugs and alcohol and then to engage in risky sexual practices.”
― Frank M. Snowden III, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present

“First was the onset of a large-scale epidemic of Asiatic cholera in South and Central America, beginning in Peru in 1991 and rapidly spreading across the continent”
― Frank M. Snowden III, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present

“Latin America in the 1990s also clearly revealed differences that distinguish “modern” from “classical” cholera. Since epidemics caused by V. El Tor are far less lethal than those epidemics caused by V. cholerae, they do not give rise to similar apocalyptic fears, riots, and mass flight.”
― Frank M. Snowden III, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present

“Quinine is a natural antimalarial present in the bark of the cinchona tree native to the Andes. It had long been known to indigenous populations, but its properties were discovered by Europeans only in the seventeenth century.”
― Frank M. Snowden III, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present

“Eager to meet the demand, the company had compromised on safety. Specifically, it did not inactivate the virus adequately, which contaminated six lots of vaccine—the ones from which the infected recipients had obtained their shots.”
― Frank M. Snowden III, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present

“the worst was that, as they retreated, the Russians systematically laid waste to the landscape. Their strategy was to force the Grande Armée to confront the insoluble problem of foraging in the midst of charred fields, empty villages, and towns reduced to smoldering piles of ashes.”
― Frank M. Snowden III, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present

“In other words, plague left in its wake vast numbers of orphans, widows, and destitute families. Furthermore, unlike most epidemic diseases, the plague did not show a predilection for the poor. It attacked universally, again conveying a sense that its arrival marked the final day of reckoning—the day of divine wrath and judgment.”
― Frank M. Snowden III, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present

“The label “dysentery,” therefore, is best regarded as a loose umbrella term that encompassed Shigellosis but probably included other severe gastrointestinal diseases.”
― Frank M. Snowden III, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present

“dramatically exposing the lack of preparedness of the international community to confront a potentially global health emergency; by awakening primordial Western fears of the jungle and untamed nature; and by feeding on racial anxieties about “darkest” Africa”
― Frank M. Snowden III, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present

“Propelled by this sense that tuberculosis was a national emergency on grounds that were at once humanitarian, sanitarian, patriotic, and economic, powerful interests throughout the industrial world launched a series of “wars” against tuberculosis during the late nineteenth century and into the early twentieth. Taken together, these efforts arguably constituted the most powerful movement ever directed against a single disease until that time.”
― Frank M. Snowden III, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present

“The areas where Ebola outbreaks have occurred since 1976 map perfectly onto the geography of deforestation in Central and West Africa.”
― Frank M. Snowden III, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present

“The illness of Brantly and Writebol was a politically transformative experience, as fear spread across the United States with the realization that the country could be in danger from Ebola.”
― Frank M. Snowden III, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present

“Another major cause of the global emergency is drug resistance. Under selective evolutionary pressures, M. tuberculosis developed resistance to the “wonder drugs” deployed against it. This was first documented in the 1970s when bacilli became resistant first to one antibiotic and then to all of the first-line medications.”
― Frank M. Snowden III, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present

“Cholera was feared for many reasons. One was its sudden appearance as an unknown invader from the East—indeed, it was called “Asiatic cholera.” It also created alarm because of its gruesome symptoms, its high CFR, its sudden onset, and its predilection for attacking adults in the prime of life.”
― Frank M. Snowden III, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present

“Until the arrival of the antibiotic era after the Second World War when streptomycin was discovered, physicians remained as helpless in the battle against tuberculosis as they had been before Villemin’s and Koch’s discoveries.”
― Frank M. Snowden III, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present

“Thus a city besieged by a major plague epidemic became a perfect dystopia. Bonds of community and family ties were severed. Religious congregations found their churches bolted, sacraments unavailable, and bells silent. Meanwhile, economic activity halted, shops closed, and employment ceased, increasing the threat of hunger and economic ruin. The political and administrative practices of normal life did not survive as authorities fell seriously ill, died, or fled.”
― Frank M. Snowden III, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present

“Meanwhile, mindful of the tubercle bacillus, conscientious individuals covered their mouths when they coughed, avoided spitting, and washed their hands and bodies frequently. The general public was also afflicted with a new anxiety about microbes that found expression in “tuberculophobia,” in the refusal to use common communion cups in church services,”
― Frank M. Snowden III, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present

“Women had long taken the leading role in managing the family and the domestic sphere, but with the advent of sanitarianism, they acquired enhanced responsibilities and new tools to meet them. It became the charge of women to protect the entire family from disease by cleansing the home and by imparting to children the lessons of personal hygiene. For many, this change resulted in a new sense of worth both outside and inside the home.”
― Frank M. Snowden III, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present

“historian Carolyn Day aptly terms “the consumptive chic,” in which the affectation of illness became a mark of social standing while corpulence and strength were vulgar. Day comments, “Since health was out of style, if an illness did not occur naturally, a number of ladies affected the trappings of sickness.” Tuberculosis, in other words, spawned a “rage for illness.”
― Frank M. Snowden III, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present

“South Africa presently has the highest number of people living with HIV in the world; 7 million South Africans in a population of 48 million are HIV-positive, for a prevalence rate of 12.9 percent—a figure that rises to 18 percent if one excludes children.”
― Frank M. Snowden III, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present

“There is consensus that DDT was a potent factor in eradicating malaria from Sardinia, but the conclusion that it acted as a stand-alone instrument is misleading. The postwar spraying took place in the midst of overlapping interventions unrelated to DDT that are not mentioned in Logan’s official account or subsequent histories.”
― Frank M. Snowden III, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present

“This line of inquiry led to the discovery that, if heat was applied to destroy the bacteria, spoilage did not occur and the taste of the wine or milk was not affected.”
― Frank M. Snowden III, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present

“penicillin, which was discovered in 1928 by Alexander Fleming and put to therapeutic medical uses from 1941. Penicillin had no relevance to TB specifically, but it opened the way to the development of a series of additional “magic bullets” and to the belief that TB could be eradicated globally by a spectacular technological fix. The first of these “wonder drugs” applicable to tuberculosis was the antibiotic streptomycin, which was discovered at Rutgers University by Selman Waksman in 1943.”
― Frank M. Snowden III, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present