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The Invisible Killers
Humankind has made so much progress in bending nature to our will that we sometimes forget our own place in it. The history of pandemics shows that the proverbial fourth horseman of the apocalypse – pestilence – can never be vanquished, only contained.
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Mark Honigsbaum, The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris, Hurst Publishers, 2019.
MILAN – In 1969, the US surgeon general, William H. Stewart, told Congress that it was time “to close the books on infectious diseases” and “declare the war against pestilence won.” Antibiotics, vaccines, and widespread advances in sanitation were making the world healthier than ever. Within a few years, the medical schools at Harvard and Yale actually closed their infectious-disease departments. By then, polio, typhoid, cholera, and even measles had essentially been eradicated, at least in the West.