Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations

Hardback. New. <p><b>Cities and countries engulfed by panic and death, desperate for vaccines but fearful of what inoculation may bring. This is what the world has just gone through with Covid-19. But as Simon Schama shows in his epic history of vulnerable humanity caught between the terror of contagion and the ingenuity of science, it has happened before. </b><br />  <br /> Characteristically, with Schama the message is delivered through<b> gripping, page-turning stories</b> set in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: smallpox strikes London; cholera hits Paris; plague comes to India. Threading through the scenes of terror, suffering and hope – in hospitals and prisons, palaces and slums – are<b> an unforgettable cast of characters</b>: a philosopher-playwright burning up with smallpox in a country chateau; a vaccinating doctor paying house calls in Halifax; a woman doctor in south India driving her inoculator-carriage through the stricken streets as dead monkeys drop from the trees. But we are also in the labs when<b> great, life-saving breakthroughs</b> happen, in Paris, Hong Kong and Mumbai.<br />  <br /> At the heart of it all, an unsung hero: Waldemar Haffkine. <b>A gun-toting Jewish student in Odesa turned microbiologist at the Pasteur Institute</b>, hailed in England as ‘the saviour of mankind’ for vaccinating millions against cholera and bubonic plague in British India while being cold-shouldered by the medical establishment of the Raj. <b>Creator of the world’s first mass production line of vaccines</b> in Mumbai, he is <b>tragically brought down in</b><b> an act of shocking injustice.</b><br />  <br /><i>Foreign Bodies </i>crosses borders between east and west, Asia and Europe, the worlds of rich and poor, politics and science. Its thrilling story carries with it the credo of its author on<b> the interconnectedness of humanity and nature</b>; of the powerful and the people. Ultimately, Schama says, as we face the challenges of our times together, <b>‘there are no foreigners, only familiars’.</b></p>