Simon Schama's book Foreign Bodies | A history of pandemics
The book brings together stories of diseases that decimate populations and the scientists past and present who studied them
What comes to mind when we hear ‘cholera’? Why is cholera still a problem in the world today? The Bay of Bengal has the dubious distinction of housing on its shores the only populations in the world where the disease has been endemic (‘in the people’) for centuries. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the movement of sailors, traders and indentured labour carried the infection to Europe, the Americas and Africa. The spread of cholera and the need for international cooperation was recognised by Adrien Proust, father of novelist Marcel Proust, before the causative agent was recognised in the late 19th century. Although Robert Koch is credited with the discovery of the cholera bacillus in 1884, John Snow had already demonstrated the role of contaminated water in transmission, Filippo Pacini had described the swarms of bacteria in intestinal fluids and Proust had mapped the spread of cholera.
