A History of the World in Six Plagues: How Contagion, Class, and Captivity Shaped Us, from Cholera to Covid-19

In the vein of Medical Apartheid, The Color of Law, and Just Medicine, a prodigious history of global disease that reveals the devastating link between public health and systemic inequality.

AIDS, cholera, the Spanish flu--epidemics become catastrophic not only by chance, but by human design. With clear-eyed research and accessible prose, A History of the World in Six Plagues shows that throughout history, outbreaks of disease have been exacerbated by the racial, economic, and sociopolitical divides we allow to bloom in times of good health. These self-defeating practices have time and again undermined public health efforts, and ultimately furthered damage to the already marginalized and vulnerable communities they target.

Princeton-trained historian Edna Bonhomme’s examination of humankind’s disastrous treatment of pandemic disease takes us across place and time from Port-au-Prince to Tanzania, and from plantation-era America to our modern COVID-19-scarred world to unravel the shocking truths about the history of race, class, and gender-based discrimination in the face of disease. From Haitians targeted and ostracized as the alleged source of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, to the creation of concentration camps and depraved medical experimentations in the face of sleeping sickness in western Africa, and to marginalized communities overlooked and scapegoated while the wealthy sheltered from COVID-19 in relative safety, Bonhomme effortlessly shows us the oppressive practices that shape our history and our present. Much more than a remarkable history, A History of the World in Six Plagues is also a rising call to action for change.

Edna Bonhomme is a historian, writer, and editor whose work has appeared in Esquire, The Guardian, The Atlantic, London Review of Books, and elsewhere. She earned a PhD from Princeton University, a master’s degree from Columbia University, and a bachelor’s degree from Reed College. She previously held fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, the Camargo Foundation, and Baldwin for the Arts.