Pathogenesis

Kennedy has it all: germs, genes, and jokes.

I was lucky enough to get an ARC of Pathogenesis by Jonathan Kennedy through Netgalley. I was very excited to read it and was not disappointed. I love learning about diseases – I am a diehard fan of This Podcast Will Kill You – and I feel like I learned so much through this book.

One of the aspects of Pathogenesis I appreciated was Kennedy’s dedication to including colonialism and its modern shadows in his history of diseases and their spread. This includes deeper information on the spread of smallpox in Meso and South America by the Spanish, of which most people already have a rudimentary understanding, and explanations of how the Transatlantic Slave Trade spread disease and its devastating consequences.

This aspect of the book meshed very well with another non-fiction book I have read recently – Superior by Angela Saini. Kennedy’s breakdown of early hominid migration patterns and how they affected human evolution and DNA was especially interesting and complementary to Superior. Pathogenesis is rightfully heavy on science, but it is not dense or thudding.

And he’s got jokes

“For early humans, the Eastern Mediterranean region must have seemed like a cursed realm, the Palaeolithic equivalent of Tolkien’s Mordor.”

&

“Oliver Cromwell, who headed an austere Protestant dictatorship after the execution of Charles I in 1649, came down with malaria but stubbornly refused to take a medicine that was so closely associated with papists. He died shortly afterwards.”

Pathogenesis is informative and entertaining, in the vein of Mary Roach (author of Stiff, Packing for Mars, and others) and I would recommend this book, especially as it is so relevant to today’s political landscape – and yes, public health is political.