Bookshelf
Contagion: How Commerce Has Spread Disease
Much as we take comfort in the belief that modern medicine and public health tactics can protect us from horrifying contagious diseases, such faith is dangerously unfounded. So demonstrates Mark Harrison in this pathbreaking investigation of the intimate connections between trade and disease throughout modern history. For centuries commerce has been the single most important factor in spreading diseases to different parts of the world, the author shows, and today the same is true. But in today's global world, commodities and germs are circulating with unprecedented speed.
Beginning with the plagues that ravaged Eurasia in the fourteenth century, Harrison charts both the passage of disease and the desperate measures to prevent it. He examines the emergence of public health in the Western world, its subsequent development elsewhere, and a recurring pattern of misappropriation of quarantines, embargoes, and other sanitary measures for political or economic gain – even for use as weapons of war. In concluding chapters the author exposes the weaknesses of today's public health regulations – a set of rules that not only disrupt the global economy but also fail to protect the public from the afflictions of trade-borne disease.
Featured On Episode #217
Money Matters
This week, we’re looking at some of the less savory effects of global trade and market economies. We’ll speak to Mark Harrison, Director of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine and Professor of the History of Medicine at Oxford University, about his book Contagion: How Commerce Has Spread Disease. And we speak to Nora Szech, Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Bamberg, about her research into the ways that markets influence moral decisionmaking.