Viruses, Plagues & History by Michael Oldstone, Oxford University Press,
拢18.95/$25, ISBN 0195117239
IN the winter of 1918-1919, one-fifth of humanity succumbed to influenza.
About 30 million people died鈥攆our times the number who fell during the
Great War. Where, then, are their wreaths? Where are their monuments?
Plagues show up our vulnerability, our intellectual shortcomings, our
predilection for panic, No wonder we virtually exclude them from our histories.
Now Michael Oldstone鈥檚 Viruses, Plagues & History provides a more
balanced account鈥攁 human history of viruses and immunisation, from the
(not ineffective) Chinese practice of sniffing dried smallpox scabs in the 1st
century, to the controversy surrounding the identification and management of the
new variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, known as nvCJD, today.
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Inevitably, Oldstone鈥檚 most memorable narratives deal with plagues and our
responses to them, which change hardly at all. Ebola-stricken Kikwit鈥檚
quarantine in 1995 would have been familiar to the yellow fever-haunted
residents of Memphis 117 years earlier. And the century that passed between
Edward Jenner鈥檚 formulation of smallpox vaccine and the extermination of the
virus seems less shocking when you recall that the vaccine for measles, which
today kills more than a million children a year, was invented as long ago as
1961.
Eye-witness accounts and a sprinkling of striking statistics add the human
dimension missing from Oldstone鈥檚 academic, sometimes fussy style. Too often,
however, Viruses, Plagues & History reads like a series of
encyclopedia entries. The rigid, fill-in-the-blanks structure of the book gives
Oldstone no opportunity to digress or鈥攈orrors!鈥攕peculate. When he
looks at the untamed viruses that will inspire people to buy the book鈥擧IV,
and the haemorrhagic fevers hantavirus, Ebola and Lassa鈥攈is reticence
reads almost like laziness.
Oldstone鈥檚 book is far too cautious to change the way we view ourselves and
our history. This is a pity. Virology and immunology are fields that are
virtually self-replenishing鈥攏ew pathogens rise and roll like a surf over
us, continually. Oldstone tells us what he knows about this process, nothing
less. Sadly, nothing more.
