Twelve Diseases That Changed Our World

By: Irwin W. Sherman

Narrated by: Chris Sorensen

Length: 10 hrs and 43 mins

Publisher's summary

This book covers the history of 12 important diseases and addresses public health responses and societal upheavals.

• Chronicles the ways disease outbreaks shaped traditions and institutions of Western civilization.
• Explains the effects, causes, and outcomes from past epidemics.
• Describes a dozen diseases to show how disease control either was achieved or failed.
• Makes clear the interrelationship between diseases and history.
• Presents material in a compelling, clear, and jargon-free prose for a wide audience.
• Provides a picture of the best practices for dealing with disease outbreaks.

©2007 ASM Press (P)2021 Tantor

And illuminating book.

I enjoyed the book very much. I did not care for the narrator, but the story of the history and the science were fascinating.

A Beautiful, Cross-Disciplinary Study

I loved how this book handled the impact of diseases, exploring not only their effects on medicine but on culture. The author does not shy away from the dramatic societal changes sparked by illnesses, including how we think, our concept of morality, and our acceptance of others. From the potato blight's sparking of the Irish diaspora and its impact on America to the changes in our acceptance of sexual behavior sparked by syphilis and the romanticization of tuberculosis, this book covers it all.

Several of the chapters may take their name from one disease or another. Still, the author skillfully relates some to other diseases that have had similar impacts, such as the twin curses of porphyria and hemophilia that have plagued the royal families of Europe.

Twelve Disease will take you on a whirlwind tour and leave you contemplating the impact not just of diseases but of other natural events on our history that, with the hubris of our species, consider to be of our own making.

I really wanted to like this more than I did.

Lately I have been on a medical history book binge. So when this one came up, I figured it fell right into that theme. I was not fond of the narrator but stuck with it. It's very science-y, which is fine but I thought it was a little much for a book that's not a text book. I almost gave up at the halfway point when a long list of people who were afflicted with a particular disease was read with each one's birth and death dates. So not necessary. I skipped ahead as it seemed to go on forever and my mind had wandered off to wonder just how long the list would be.
I truly wanted to like this book. I have found other books on medical history I have enjoyed more. There is a lot of information here and a really interesting part that nearly foreshadows the COVID pandemic is a way that was eerily correct.