"Epidemiology is not an esoteric branch of expertise, but an important aspect of the 'big picture' of historical change and development," says Frank M. Snowden, a prominent European scholar of social medicine and history. In other words, the epidemic has no less important impact on the development of human society than the economic crisis, war, revolution and demographic changes. For this assertion, Mitchell L. Hammond, a professor of history at the University of Victoria, is undoubtedly a powerful proof of this statement in 2020 — the book "Epidemics and the Modern World" has turned out to be a new anthropological revisit of the critical role of epidemics in modernity. The authors revisit eleven epidemics (plague, syphilis, smallpox, yellow fever, cholera, tuberculosis, rinderpest, influenza, malaria, polio, and AIDS) to intertwine disease with global modernization by illustrating the historically independent role of disease and the shaping capacity of modern society, expanding the horizon of human and social sciences' understanding of disease.
Mitchell Hammond attended Yale University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in political science and a master's degree in religious history, and later a master's degree and doctorate in European history from the University of Virginia. He observes religion and medicine in Germany from the perspective of history, political science and religion, explores the relationship between medicine and the Reformation, the development of medical poverty alleviation, and the evolution of the role of medical practitioners in urban life, and further extends the theme from the Renaissance to the study of modern medical history and disease history. The close integration of the history of human development, the history of social medicine and modern cultural topics has paved the way for the emergence of this multi-perspective and interdisciplinary project that breaks through the traditional framework.
First, the historical care of "from the Black Death to AIDS"
Since 2005, Dr Hammond has been an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Victoria, where he has taught as many as six courses devoted to the study of disease history, and the structure of The Epidemic and the Modern World comes from his course "From the Black Death to AIDS". To help students better explore the critical aspects of modern history and practical strategies for interpreting history, Hammond uses the advances of science and the development of society to revisit epidemics and dig deeper into their origins and social impacts.
The study of disease is actually a long-term exploration of environmental, social and scientific change. Nearly 40 years ago, Robert P. Hudson proposed that disease is not an immutable entity, but a dynamic social structure with its own biography. Disease is both a pathological reality and a social construct. From the late 19th century to the mid-20th century, science played a leading role in disease research. In the history of medicine, a large number of literature shows that disease is an objective biological phenomenon, and the most intense struggle against disease is the doctors trained under the modern scientific system, whose thoughts and behaviors are the embodiment of modern Western biological models, and these literatures usually make little reference to the impact of disease on social structure or individual daily life. In the 1960s and 1980s, inspired by Foucault's theory, many historians and social scientists further discovered the complex factors behind this positivism and began to argue that disease was first and foremost a cultural construct, rooted in mental habits and social relations, and not merely a pathological phenomenon of objective biology. They use socially constructed ways to show that the core of disease and medicine is shaped by contingent social factors, and on this basis explores the evolution of public health, border control, and socio-politics. The expansion of medical knowledge at the societal level, accompanied by the interaction between ideology and vested interests, pathogens and diseases affect not only individual health, but also the collective perception of disease in society. From the 1960s to the present, the progress of modern medical biology and the transformation of the political process have complicated the problem, so that the uncertainty of future changes in the epidemic has always been the focus of academic attention.
With the development of technology and ideology, the religious symbols of disease were removed, and disease increasingly became a natural entity that could be understood and cured. As a way of thinking and a model of social organization, modernity can encompass everything, and Hammond balances the scientific and political, socio-economic, and cultural contexts of disease etiology and disease cycles in Epidemics and the Modern World. Well aware that advances in the natural sciences have driven the history of medicine, especially the study of the history of disease, the author cleverly draws on modern scientific tools to identify past diseases and is critical of current scientific explanations. Each chapter in the book briefly outlines the current scientific understanding of the disease, and then discusses in chronological order the research topics related to the disease in modern history within a specific time frame.
In the words of John Robert McNeill, a pioneer in american environmental history research, Hammond has created one of the most popular and best-suited textbooks in the history of human disease since the Black Death. Pandemics and the Modern World revolves around the many issues of disease history, engaging students and teachers with fluid and easy-to-read texts, engaging stories, and intertwining the epidemic with a large number of documents, maps and pictures to capture the reader's attention. As a textbook that takes into account both readability and scholarship, on the one hand, the book provides readers with a large number of images, concepts and technical interpretations for readers who lack research experience in the history of science and the history of medicine, with strong readability and rigor; on the other hand, the epidemics expounded in the book have a great attraction to professional readers for challenging thinking about the modern world, leaving readers with a wide range of thinking space.
The book covers the comprehensive and comprehensive field of disease history, science history, environmental history and history of cultural thought, and the analysis of various views corroborates each other, and the persuasiveness of historical facts and the logic of views fit perfectly, thanks to the author's integration of a large number of documents and original materials, throughout the recording process, Hammond strictly distinguishes between primary and secondary materials, and the end of each chapter shows the first-hand information related to the theme of this chapter and the suggestions for secondary reading, leaving the choice of historical practice to the reader. But even so, the imbalance in data collection has largely constrained Hammond's re-examination of the epidemic from a global perspective.
Plague in Naples, Italy, 1656.
Second, the "modernity" of disease in the context of globalization
The emergence of global history is a remarkable feature of academic history in the past 30 years, and the history of globalization affecting diseases has become the consensus of medical historians. However, although disease historians studying the Black Death and the Pandemic were among the pioneers in the early study of global history, the "global shift" in historiography had a relatively small impact on the study of health, disease, and medical history. Most scholars remain limited to specific medical traditions, nation-states, and political shifts. In recent years, the awareness of interdisciplinary research in the academic field has become more and more distinct, and the research of medicine, sociology, history, political science, literature and other studies has focused on multi-dimensional, multi-perspective and multi-theme, trying to get rid of the academic dilemma of only focusing on "internal history" research. William H. McNeill's famous book Plagues and Peoples takes the plague as a unique perspective on the development of global human history, arguing that disease has fundamentally shaped the way peoples communicate. In 1999, Peter Baldwin turned his attention to the relationship between the political and public health systems in Europe and used this as a perspective to complete the classic in the history of medicine, Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830–1930, although strictly speaking, this is not a typical work of global history. But the breadth of vision and depth of thought of this work was of great benefit to the subsequent study of the history of medicine, political theory, and European history (disease history and political science), and stimulated scholars' interest in interdisciplinary study of disease history. In 2015, Mark Harrison, a professor of history at the University of Oxford, sought to show the relationship between topics such as disease, health and medical history and global dynamics. Undoubtedly, the deepening of world integration is an important reason for the "globalization" of medical history. According to historian Sarah Hodges, the key issues that make up the history of medicine are significant in the context of globalization. However, the context of "globalization" provides almost all the analytical frameworks and sources of problems for the study of medical social history, in which the relationship between differences, medicine, colonialism and power is ignored, and globalization acts as a soothing lubricant, whereby differences are integrated into the community and gradually ignored. Therefore, the first thing to ensure in a critical work of global medical history is that globalization is no longer simplistic and reproduced as a set of systems, discourses and practices, and the mission of paying attention to the differences and imbalances in health governance under the process of globalization is becoming more urgent.
In this regard, Mark Harrison, in Disease and the Modern World: 1500 to the present day, shows that the modernization took place unevenly, bringing about economic change and social chaos. Especially in the comparison of global efforts to address COVID-19, corruption, privilege and poor economic management in developing countries constitute structural inequalities between poor and rich countries. Harrison has great expectations for a joint response to the epidemic situation through international cooperation under globalization. Also a work of disease history with modernity as the central theme, Hammond's "Epidemics and the Modern World" is outstanding in that it draws on Harrison's difference thesis, accurately explores the health governance of various peoples, pointing out that the growing gap in resources, infrastructure and access to health care between countries is not only a key dilemma and a huge challenge to global health governance, but also an important feature of the unbalanced globalization process of the modern world. In other words, if Harrison is a critique of the past "mistakes" of global health governance, then Hammond regards the global epidemic of contemporary diseases as a crisis inevitable caused by the accumulation of history, focusing more on the present and the future, and the brilliance of "modernity" is highlighted.
Medicine and Empire: The Birth of Modern Medicine from Global History
Beginning at the end of the 15th century, Western observers found that many elements of modernity in the West were influenced by the dependencies or exploitative relationships established by Europeans with others, and adopted Weber's concept of "modernity" as a measure of social achievement around the world, that is, the Western-centric way of telling history, began to explain that the many interactions and independent developments between the worlds shaped all modernity. To avoid describing the West as the center of history, Hammond attempted to analyze the role of disease in past and modern societies through the lens of global history. Pratik Chakrabarti, a professor of history at the University of Manchester, argues in His book Medicine and Empire: The Birth of Modern Medicine from Global History that the conflict between colonialism and nationalism led to the evolution of public health measures as part of the struggle for colonial hegemony, triggering a global disease crisis and divergence in response. Hammond also tries to cite this view to prove the gap in perspective and the conflict of decision-making between colonial administrators and colonists, in order to explain the origins of the epidemic modernity crisis in the colonial era, but in fact he is biased in his discourse to attribute positive factors such as science and institutions to the so-called "Western" superiority. For example, when the author describes the global spread of the plague in the 1890s, he mostly discusses the construction of Western-style public health systems in other regions under the colonial system, highlights the great influence of the West on public health measures in China, India and South Africa at that time, and argues that China and India, like medieval Europe, set up health systems only to serve the rule, not to be a disease control strategy in the scientific sense. On the issue of the global epidemic of syphilis, the author focuses on Western regulatory treatment measures and achievements, deliberately downplaying the adverse effects of the export of this disease on non-Western regions, especially In Asia, and briefly mentioning China in the late 16th century and Japan in the 1850s. However, historical sources clearly show that syphilis was introduced to Asia with the Portuguese around 1500 – as a new disease, the first spread of syphilis among new populations was undoubtedly fatal. Confined to the tendency of opinion, Hammond avoids the importance of such issues and lacks sufficient and profound elaboration, so that his globalization research is actually trapped in the Western center of "modernity". Even if there are defects and deficiencies in this regard, in the pathological and social research of balanced diseases, as well as the consideration of global differences, this work is still a representative of the "open eyes to the world" in the history of medical society, with important academic value and distinct practical significance for reference.
Afterword
Combining the latest research findings in genetics, microbiology, immunology, parasitology and climatology in the natural sciences, Epidemics and the Modern World explores in depth the relationship between epidemics and modern historical themes: state institutions, colonial mechanisms, the relationship between humans and animals, perceptions of pain, sex, race and disability, which in turn shape the medical history of disease, which in turn reshapes human society. Environmental historians emerging after World War II have keenly discovered that human activity has become an important force in shaping the natural ecology in just a few centuries. From this perspective, the scope of the achievements and challenges of the forces of modernization has been greatly expanded: on the one hand, after the Second World War, with the continuous development of technology, medical and public health advances have eradicated many dangerous diseases in nature; on the other hand, behind these achievements, there are the forced displacement of millions of people, the ecological transformation of vast natural landscapes, the great destruction caused by war, and the persistence of social stratification and inequality in the world economic order.
Humans have had and will continue to have a more profound interactive impact on the natural environment, with diseases being transmitted from one place to another for thousands of years, agricultural and urban environments constantly being shaped and altered, and diseases taking root in more complex transformations. Colonization, urbanization and technological change have all profoundly affected unique modern diseases. Nowadays, the large-scale transformation of the landscape and the change of the living environment of microorganisms by human beings have irreversibly destroyed the pathogens and the way pathogens are transmitted, the relationship between microorganisms and other organisms changes over time, and these changes gradually exceed the scope of human cognition, and the forces of modernity have solved some problems while exacerbating the seriousness of some problems, which have contributed to new global challenges. Where will humanity go from these challenges? As the coronavirus spreads on the industrial streets of the globe and AIDS is spreading at an alarming rate in central and southern Africa, the history of the epidemic has new meanings in our time and should be given new thinking. As the author says at the end of the book, humans write history, but microbes also have history; it is important not only to trace the past, but to recognize what happened in the past and find solutions to future challenges, it is necessary to consider how one history depends on another.