HOWARD MARKEL. When Germs Travel: Six Major Epidemics that Have Invaded America and the Fears They Have Unleashed. New York, Vintage Books, 2005. xiv, 263 pp., illus. $25 (hardcover), $13.95 (paper).
2006; Oxford University Press; Volume: 61; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/jhmas/jrj043
ISSN1468-4373
Autores Tópico(s)Zoonotic diseases and public health
ResumoHoward Markel has a distinguished record of writing about the intersection between immigration and public health. Quarantine! East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), in which he dissected epidemics of cholera and typhus fever, was a major contribution to this field, and its laudatory reviews were well deserved. When Germs Travel occupies that same intersection but covers a longer span of time in a more popular vein. Although the subtitle and cover promise more than this slender volume can deliver, this prefatory slip should not be counted against the book itself. This volume is written in an engaging style and contains much that is informative and useful for the general reader. Markel proposes “six chronicles of epidemics that span decades of medical progress as well as the two ‘great waves of immigration’ to the United States” (8). These “epidemics” (the reason for the quotation marks later) include tuberculosis (nationally, in the late nineteenth century and today), bubonic plague (San Francisco, 1900–1908), typhus (El Paso and its environs, 1916–1917), trachoma (nationally, 1897–1925), HIV/AIDS in Haitians (1980–present), and cholera (recently, in Detroit). The “great waves of immigration” involved Europeans from roughly 1890 to 1924, and people from Asia, Africa, and the Western Hemisphere south of the United States in the post-1965 wave.
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