Melissa Shepherd

“Alexander Fleming issued a prophetic warning. Penicillin, he advised, needed to be administered with care because the bacteria susceptible to it were likely to develop resistance. The selective pressure of so powerful a medicine would make it inevitable.”
― Frank M. Snowden III, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present

“As Claude Bernard had prophetically suggested, the laboratory bench became the emblem of the newly emergent medical science and the locus of medical epistemology.”
― Frank M. Snowden III, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present

“Such pervasive and violent opposition to the city’s public health program prevented the plan from being implemented as every municipal initiative provoked a violent backlash and drove Naples to a state of near anarchy. The Times of London commented that the port was afflicted with something worse than cholera—“medieval ignorance and superstition.”
― Frank M. Snowden III, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present

“In case you’re inclined to dismiss such obstacles as a vanished feature of the remote past, in the state of Florida in the year 2000 about 100,000 potential voters, the vast majority of them Democrats, were pruned off the list of registered voters. That pruning had an enormous effect on tipping the Florida 2000 presidential vote, hence the U.S. presidency,”
― Jared Diamond, Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis