Simon Schama. Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines, and the Health of Nations. 2023
Tim Cook. Fight to the Finish: Canadians in the Second World War 1944-1945. Vol 2. 2015
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.
Tim Cook. Fight to the Finish: Canadians in the Second World War 1944-1945. Vol 2. 2015
I am going to do a quick review of Tim Cook’s Fight to the Finish: Canadians in the Second World War 1944-1945. Vol 2. which I have just finished. I am preparing a trip in the early spring to see some of the World War I battlefields, and then on to Belgium and Amsterdam to see some Van Eyck, Vermeer and Rembrandt. Since I will (coincidentally) be in Holland for May 5,Liberation Day, and that liberation was accomplished by the Canadian Army, I thought it would be a good idea to refresh my memory of the events. Not to mention that my father flew a Lancaster for the RCAF in the same war. So, some close associations.
I also wanted to pay tribute to the work of our premier war historian who, very sadly, died on October 25, 2025 at the young age of 53 of Hodgkin’s disease. This was an irreparable loss to the world of Canadian War History. I can unequivocally recommend his two-volume history of Canada in the Great War: At the Sharp End and Shock Troops. Combined, it is the best history of the First World War from the Canadian perspective ever written.
As far as Fight to the Finish: Canadians in the Second World War 1944-1945 is concerned, it is equally as enthralling as the other three books listed below. Cook is not afraid to criticize or praise where he sees fit. Some rather forgotten generals come in for approbation and some well-known ones – particularly American ones – get properly taken down; particularly Mark Clarke who semi-botched Anzio and then rushed to seize Rome (and the headlines)while allowing a German army to escape encirclement. Montgomery, as well, takes a few hits from Cook. Sometimes generals prefer the front page to the front line.
The book’s strongest asset is it’s focus on D-Day in the first half. Using Hollywood as its cudgel, the USA has beaten it into the head of the Western World that D-Day was American and it simply was not; notwithstanding Private Ryan and The Longest Day. The Americans were, at the most, one third of the force landing on the beaches and almost none of the delivering and supporting navy. The men from Canada on Juno beach went through all the hell portrayed on film and penetrated the farthest inland of any force on day one, and that deserves to be remembered.
There are two other things that the book is important for dealing with. One is the (I hope) final settlement of the troubling question of whether the mass bombing of German cities significantly contributed to war effort or was merely a revenge slaughter. Cook spends (in both volumes) a considerable time on the air war and his final conclusion is that the bombing was a major contributor, if only in the way it drew weapons and personnel away from the front (particularly the eastern front) to protect the German cities. In away, the bombing raids constituted the “Second Front” that Stalin demanded so stridently.
The other matter was the afore-mentioned liberation of the Netherlands. Holland was the last country to be liberated from the Nazis (I don’t count Austria) and the people there were – literally – starving. Technically, they were surviving on 500 calories a day, but in fact (unless they could access the Black Market – and few could) they were getting even less than 500 calories. The Canadian army freed them and then fed them – often with their own rations. And they are remembered for it to this day. Happy May 5!
Also:
Tim Cook. The Necessary War: Canadians Fighting the Second World War 1939-1943 Vol. 1. 2014
Tim Cook. At the Sharp End: Canadians Fighting the Great War 1914-1916. Vol 1. 2007
Tim Cook. Shock Troops: Canadians Fighting the Great War1917-1918. Vol. 2. 2008
