Plagues and Peoples

The history of disease is the history of humankind: an interpretation of the world as seen through the extraordinary impact-political, demographic, ecological, and psychological-of disease on cultures.

“A book of the first importance, a truly revolutionary work.” -The New Yorker

From the conquest of Mexico by smallpox as much as by the Spanish, to the bubonic plague in China, to the typhoid epidemic in Europe, William H. McNeill's Plagues and Peoples is “a brilliantly conceptualized an...