Simon Schama. Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines, and the Health of Nations. 2023
Simon Schama. Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines, and the Health of Nations. 2023
This appeared, at first, to be a Covid book, written, I suspect, in white-hot fury at the stupidity we humans displayed before, during and after the pandemic. It is about drinking bleach and taking Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin. It is about not wearing masks as a statement of freedom (and often dying) and it is about the Republican war on science (although Schama never mentions political parties) and the relentless hatred for and pursuit of Anthony Fauci. And I would have passed on it because of a sincere desire to leave behind that era of stupidity and anger, except that it is by Simon Schama.
There are a lot of bad historians out there in the world of the written word. Some can get so bogged down in the details or the theories that you find yourself, as a reader, wondering what the book is actually about. Others are so fact and date oriented that you have to wonder at their private emotional lives. These are the ones that have truly given history a bad name. And then there are the greats – the ones who can give the facts clearly, elucidate the meanings and forces behind them and have endlessly fascinating stories to tell that never bore and always enrich. Usually they are women like Barbara Tuchman (still the best, in my estimation), Antonia Fraser and Mary Beard. And then there is Mr. Schama.
I encountered Simon Schama relatively late and so I still have a number of his books to look forward to. My first was his history of the French Revolution and it was a revelation. Finally, the whole chaotic jumble made sense and I was hooked. So, when I saw Foreign Bodies, I was hooked and read it – and although it deals with Covid it is much more about the history of inoculation and some great historical figures that I was not aware of and how they were treated.
I expected him to start with Jenner and cowpox but he only mentions Jenner on p. 401 and only to point out that he was not the first to use cowpox to inoculate against smallpox and it didn’t matter because no one took any notice any way. The real hero in the smallpox story – a disease that killed, disfigured and blinded multitudes with brutal efficiency – was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. She, the great beauty of her time, had been disfigured by the disease and, while staying in Istanbul, discovered that the local people (particularly the Circassian people) vaccinated from active cases of smallpox with great effectiveness. She had the procedure performed on her young son and then went on to promote the procedure throughout England. Her ideas were not well received – too foreign, too Turkish, too barbarian, too Islamic. Schama points out that there is strong evidence that older cultures in Wales and Highland Scotland had been practicing the live inoculation procedure for centuries. But the English considered those people savages as well.
We have a tendency of thinking of the plague – The Black Death, the Bubonic Plague – as strictly late Medieval. It was, but that was not the end of it. In 1720-2 southern France, around Marseille had an outbreak that killed half the population – about 100,000 people. In the 1770’s there was a bad outbreak in Sweden and a few years later about a quarter of a million died of it in Russia. The European reaction was typically schizophrenic. They knew that the origins of the disease were in the east (particularly in India where it had never gone away) and that increased trade carried the disease – it was not known until the end of the 19th century that it moved in the fleas that lived on the blood of rats but were not particular about consuming human blood. But they opposed any restrictions on trade and even quarantines (they slowed down business profits). Besides, no one country could control any trade other than their own.
I was familiar with the works of Marcel Proust – marvelous– but I was unaware that his father Adrien was a doctor who had a keen interest in the particular problem of pandemics. Adrien Proust gave his career and his prestige (which was, apparently, enormous) to this problem and could be considered the godfather of the WHO (the same one that Trump is trying to destroy). It probably caused his death from exhaustion and stroke.
Finally, we come to the heart of the book. Here we find a man that I have never heard of and yet he probably saved more lives from epidemic disease (certainly from the plague) than any one else in history: Waldemar Mordechai Wolff Haffkine.
Haffkine discovered the bacteria (yersinia pestis) that caused the plague, developed a vaccine for it (which he tested first on himself), developed a way to create large amounts of the vaccine – in the field – and then went to India and began to save lives, despite opposition from the authorities (the Raj) and most other scientists. He vaccinated in person and trained other people to do it as well. Eventually there was an accident involving tetanus (he was not, himself, present) and he was fired and kicked out of India. There have always been and will always be the idiotic ant-vaxxers.
As Schama says in his conclusion:
Something about inoculators, vaccinators, epidemiologists gets under the skin of public tribunes for whom nothing, certainly not epidemiology, is politics-free. Their fury swells into maddened vehemence to the point where it becomes commonplace to wish inoculators banished, imprisoned or dead.
The Anthony Faucis of this world.
p.390
In the end, there are some very clear lessons to be learned – which we will not learn, apparently. The old diseases are never totally be extinguished. They will always live on in some dark corner of the world: smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, plague. As we lose our vigilance (often through either religious mania or parasitic influencers who sell our health for gain) these diseases will triumphantly return and kill. The new diseases, constantly mutating, will be transmitted to us zoonotically(from wild and semi-domesticated animals) as we persistently force ourselves into their world in search of profits. These diseases – like the various forms of SARS – will be upon us before we are prepared and will, like Covid, take a terrible toll. We can only prevent them by research and the discipline of herd inoculation. Unfortunately, we cannot vaccinate against stupidity and greed.
