Overview

The 2014 Ebola epidemic demonstrated the power of pandemics and their ability not only to destroy lives locally but also to capture the imagination and terrify the world. In 2019 and the years that followed, the coronavirus pandemic infected every continent and took the lives of millions. In this updated edition, Christian W. McMillen provides a concise yet comprehensive account of pandemics throughout human history, illustrating how pandemic disease has shaped history and, at the same time, social behavior has influenced pandemic disease. This Very Short Introduction describes history's major pandemics. McMillen discusses state responses to pandemics, such as quarantine, isolation, travel restrictions, and other forms of social control, and pays special attention to the rise of public health and the explosion of medical research in the wake of pandemics, especially as the germ theory of disease emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today, medicine is able to control all of these diseases, yet some of them are still devastating in much of the developing world. By assessing the relationship between poverty and disease and the geography of epidemics, McMillen offers an outspoken and thought-provoking point of view on the necessity for global governments to learn from past experiences and cooperate to prevent any future epidemic.

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Christian W. McMillen is a professor of history at the University of Virginia, where he teaches courses on American Indian history and the history of epidemic disease. He is the author of Making Indian Law: The Hualapai Land Case and the Birth of Ethnohistory and Discovering Tuberculosis: A Global History, 1900 to the Present. William Sarris is an accomplished voice actor and narrator. In addition to narrating audiobooks, he has been the voice for radio and TV commercials, e-learning, medical training, online videos, and non-broadcast media. He has done work for Fortune 500 companies like GE, Pfizer, and Unilever as well as consumer brands like Marvin Windows and Doors, Energizer, Pepsi, and Subway. He is based in Connecticut.

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