Since COVID-19 looks like it will be endemic, I thought it would be useful to know a bit more about pandemics in general. Which is why the book Plagued by John Froude attracted my attention – I thought it would be useful.

As its title says, Plagued is a book about plagues and it covers:

• The Black Death (Bubonic Plague)
• Cholera
• Typhus
• Tuberculosis
• Syphilis
• Malaria
• Smallpox
• Yellow Fever
• Spanish Flu
• HIV
• West Nile Virus/Zika/Ebola (this is all one chapter)
• SARS, MERS, COVID-19 (this is all one chapter)

Each chapter contains an overview of what caused the particular plague and how it broke out/its impact on the human population. Where relevant, the author added his own experience – for example, treating patients with cholera and his experience with COVID-19 (this was a whole chapter by itself). There’s also a lot of interesting facts inside; I didn’t know that India had practiced inoculation for a thousand years!

For the most part, each chapter is relatively short and it feels like a lot of information is being packed inside. While I generally appreciated the overview, I did think that the book just skipped over things at times – for example, as someone who remembers how scary SARS was for my country, the sentence stating that “it came and went” irked me a little. It might have just come and gone for people in the West, but I distinctly remember schools in Singapore shutting down over it. It also affected a few other countries, mostly in Asia, but it was definitely a big thing to us.

Another thing I noticed about the book was that the chapters seemed to be relatively self-contained. While that allowed me to dip in and out of the book as I wanted, it also meant that the book felt a bit disjointed at times, like a collection of essays around the same theme. I had thought it would increase my general understandings of plagues and pandemics, so this was a bit of a disappointment.

Overall, this is an interesting book that provides a good overview of some of the most famous plagues that have affected us. If you’re interested in reading about any of the above pandemics, you may be interested in picking up this book.

Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley but all opinions in this book are my own.

Featured Image: Photo from Canva