A Very Short Reading Group discussion

"...very often history is forgotten or rediscovered only when we confront contemporary epidemics and pandemics, and thus patterns from the past are repeated thoughtlessly."

It will be interesting to see how pandemics of the past were experienced and dealt with compared to our current situation.

This book was written by a historian rather than an epidemiologist, which might have been preferable. Perhaps the publishing house didn’t consider one?

Chapters are based on each of several diseases with a little cross over between them. Most salient to today was the one on influenza which noted how American Samoa keep the flu out while Western Samoa, part of the British Empire, wasn’t even warned about the pandemic.

Good choice of subject. I found the book disappointing in its brevity and scope though. Little background on what viruses and bacteria are and how they work. The disease list is short – not including many potential threats. The human element was missing – the effect on individuals and their personal accounts, which might have lifted the dryness.

There is a warning in the book about the lack of preparedness for the future pandemic we now have and how this is a mistake - but it isn’t strongly stressed. British complacency is again evident today, with the highest expected death rate in Europe.

There was no chapter on biological warfare. The ease with which a US Aircraft Carrier has been affected by Covid-19 will no doubt have been noted along with the huge general impact. Long regarded as the poor man’s atom bomb – perhaps this method of warfare deserves elevation. These war machines supposedly have NBC systems. A secretly developed agent together with a vaccine for the aggressor’s population offers a horrifying potential prospect.

Hope you and the rest of the library staff escape the current pandemic or aren't badly affected...

It was quite readable and didn’t get bogged down in detail, but I was looking for more of the science behind the diseases rather than just the historical perspective. That said the sociological perspective did offer some pertinent insights about the less immediately obvious factors involved in the spread of a pandemic. “The very simple point is that there is a relationship between disease and social conditions, conditions that do not exist everywhere and that will not be alleviated with biomedicine.” The differences between countries and within countries highlight that it isn’t just a matter of science halting a pandemic but also fundamental societal efforts to improve inequalities and injustices across the board.