How pandemics shape social evolution

How pandemics shape social evolution

THE BEST BOOKS ON PAST PANDEMICS TO READ NOW

From the Black Death to the 1918 influenza pandemic, COVID-19 is not humanity’s first brush with outbreaks. Discover what we can learn from history with Nature’s pick of the best histories and analyses of past pandemics.

• Historian Frank Snowden argues that infectious diseases have shaped social evolution no less powerfully than have wars, revolutions and economic crises. (5 min read, from 2019)
• The story of the race to stop a plague epidemic in San Francisco that broke out in 1900 is a rich history of epidemiology, political wrangling and scientific denialism. (6 min read, from 2019)
• The 1918 influenza pandemic probably infected 500 million people — one-third of the world’s population at the time. There was a wide-ranging failure of medicine and governments — which is one reason why its history has been long neglected. (5 min read, from 2017)
• An analysis of the fraught campaign to contain the 2013–16 Ebola crisis reveals the common threads of dysfunction that run through responses to epidemics. (5 min read, from 2018)
• Rediscover pioneering epidemiologist and anaesthesiologist John Snow and his meticulous mapping of the cholera epidemic in London. (5 min read, from 2013)