On Epidemics, Epidemiology, and Global Storytelling

Abstract

Near the end of his 2019/2020 book Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present,1 Frank Snowden quotes from a 1998 report by the US Department of Defense that concluded, “Historians in the next millennium may find that the 20th century’s greatest fallacy was the belief that infectious diseases were nearing elimination. The resultant complacency has actually increased the threat.”2 Surveying a variety of different