The first recorded plague pandemic— the Plague of Justinian—started in Egypt in about 541 CE, and over the next 200 years killed between a quarter and a half of Europe’s population. The second plague pandemic, sometimes called the Black Death, started in Asia in the 1300s, came in repeated epidemic waves across Europe and, over several hundred years, killed some 75 million people.
The third pandemic emerged at the dawn of the age of modern medical science, in 1894, and trailed off in the mid 20th century, leaving in its wake some 15 million dead. Plague Ports: The Global Urban Impact of Bubonic Plague, 1894–1901, Myron Echenberg’s comparative study of how different countries dealt with the disease, follows the early years of this third pandemic.
Like Maurice Ravel’s orchestral masterpiece Bolero, Plague Ports begins with an insistent theme that gradually, through repetition, each one adding more instruments, builds to an...
David Waltner-Toews is a retired professor of epidemiology in the Department of Population Medicine at the Ontario Veterinary College in the University of Guelph, the founding president of Veterinarians without Bordersé Vétérinaires sans Frontiéres Canada and the Canadian Community of Practice in Ecosystem Approaches to Human Health. He is a specialist in the epidemiology of diseases people get from animals (zoonoses) and the author of The Chickens Fight Back: Pandemic Panics and Deadly Diseases that Jump from Animals to Humans (Greystone, 2007).
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