Samuel K., Jr. Cohn, Epidemics: Hate and Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. x + 656, £22.99, hardback, ISBN: 9780198819660.

Abstract

A remarkable feature of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the outpouring of voluntary action, community support and mutual aid across the world. People from all walks of life and living in all conditions have taken to social distancing and isolation, with little protest. As doctors, nurses, health care providers and other essential workers have risked their lives to tend to the sick and dying, neighbours and communities, friends and strangers have joined together to support the most vulnerable. This is not to downplay the darker sides of the pandemicthe harrowing increase in domestic abuse or the structural violence of socioeconomic inequalities, which has meant that (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic), the poor, old and marginal have suffered disproportionately. The pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated failures to address these deeply entrenched inequalities. But while some have sought to vilify and blame certain countries or groups, COVID-19 has been largely borne peacefully with few collective acts of hatred or violence. As Samuel Cohn argues in this exhaustive global history, epidemics can give rise to social solidarity as much as they can give rise to social divisions and conflicts. This paradox should come as no surprise to historians. Yet, Cohn contends that the historiography of epidemics has relied too heavily on categories of blame and 'othering', and too little on altruism and care, with the consequence that a consensus has formed that assumes that epidemic diseases increase or foster social, ethnic and political tensions. Epidemics is meant to be a challenge and corrective to this consensus. Working comparatively across more than 2500 years, it reexamines how different diseases, from the Plague of Athens to AIDS, sparked different 'socio-psychological' reactions. The temporal and geographical scope is vast. The approach is equally ambitious. Rather than synthesise existing historical work, it surveys a massive collection of digitised archives and, for the nineteenth century onwards, the growing number of digital newspaper collections available to historians. The result is a densely empirical analysis that shows that while some epidemics sparked collective hatred and violence towards specific social groups, a large number did not follow this pattern. Divided into five parts, twenty-five chapters move chronologically from antiquity and the middle ages (Part I), to early modernity (Part II) and then to modernity (Parts III and V), with an epilogue devoted to HIV/AIDS. The sample of diseases analysed is relatively small, with focus primarily on plague, syphilis, yellow fever, cholera and influenza. The rationale for this choice, very briefly outlined in the introduction, is that these gave rise to the most sustained and dramatic collective reactions and allow for comparative analysis across time and place. Few would doubt this claim, but some explanation was needed for why other diseases, which have had an equally global impact on human history, such as tuberculosis and malaria, fail to meet these criteri...