Foreign Bodies
Pandemics, Vaccines, and the Health of Nations
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A vibrant cultural history investigating pandemics and vaccines, by bestselling author and historian Simon Schama
Cities and countries engulfed by panic and death, desperate for vaccines but fearful of what inoculation may bring. This is what the world has just gone through with Covid-19. But as Simon Schama shows in his epic history of vulnerable humanity caught between the terror of contagion and the ingenuity of science, it has happened before.
Characteristically, Schama’s message is delivered through gripping, page-turning stories set in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: smallpox strikes London; cholera hits Paris; plague comes to India. Threading through the scenes of terror, suffering and hope – in hospitals and prisons, palaces, and slums – are an unforgettable cast of characters: a philosopher-playwright burning up with smallpox in a country chateau; a vaccinating doctor paying house calls in Halifax; a woman doctor in south India driving her inoculator-carriage through the stricken streets as dead monkeys drop from the trees. But we are also in the labs when great, life-saving breakthroughs happen, in Paris, Hong Kong, and Mumbai.
At the heart of it all is an unsung hero: Waldemar Haffkine, a gun-toting Jewish student in Odesa turned microbiologist at the Pasteur Institute, hailed in England as “the saviour of mankind” for vaccinating millions against cholera and bubonic plague in British India while being cold-shouldered by the medical establishment of the Raj. Creator of the world’s first mass production line of vaccines in Mumbai, he is tragically brought down in an act of shocking injustice.
Foreign Bodies crosses borders between east and west, Asia and Europe, the worlds of rich and poor, politics and science. Its thrilling story carries with it the credo of its author on the interconnectedness of humanity and nature; of the powerful and the people. Ultimately, Schama says, as we face the challenges of our times together, “there are no foreigners, only familiars.”
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Historian Schama (The Story of the Jews) examines in this insightful study the scientific battle against epidemic diseases over the past three centuries, as scientists contended with both the contagions and human intransigence. Schama describes Europe's gradual acceptance of inoculation to combat smallpox during the 18th century, despite a populace skeptical of an "oriental" solution (the earliest version of inoculation came to Europe from the Ottomans and likely originated in China) that seemed to contravene the "will of the Almighty" (sickness being imagined as divinely ordained) and contradict widely accepted humoral theories, which posited that disease emerged naturally from within the body and strengthened survivors. Schama also recounts the later efforts of vaccine pioneers, focusing mainly on Waldemar Haffkine, a Ukrainian Jewish microbiologist who established the world's first mass production line of vaccines in British-ruled India. However, this "modern saint and savior" was brought down by anti-vaccine backlash, as he was made the scapegoat for the deaths of 19 Indians who got tetanus from a bottle of plague vaccine that was likely contaminated at the injection site, not during production. Schama concludes with a summary of Anthony Fauci's struggles in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, highlighting how modern vaccine resistance is entwined with conspiracy theories and nationalist impulses that resist international coordination, echoing past fears of "foreign" solutions. Schama's wide-ranging history brings worthwhile lessons from the past to the present. Readers will be enlightened.
