Taming Infection

Listed in Independent Book Reviews Best Books We Read This Year (2022)A clearly written, information-rich guide to the impact of infectious diseases on the United States and our responses to each of them. Coodley and Sarasohn demonstrate how science and public health have had to counter fear, ignorance and hubris-along with the microbes themselves-in battles that reached a desultory climax with our misbegotten reckoning with Covid-19. Arthur Allen, author of The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. WeiglThe book is a timely and urgent reminder that the battle against deadly infectious disease must be relentless. It celebrates our victories without losing sight of the horrendous human toll exacted, and it warns us that we repeat the mistakes of the past at our own peril. Stephen Coss, author of The Fever of 1721: The Epidemic that Revolutionized Medicine and American Politics---Infection has written its own history of the United States, terrifying, sickening and killing more Americans that all the nations wars put together. Taming Infection is the story of fifteen of the worst diseases to strike the United States throughout our history and how Americans brought them under control.Some of these diseases now are associated only with far away lands. Yet, at one time, malaria afflicted most of the United States, even infecting multiple Presidents. Plague struck in San Francisco, and cholera and typhoid in New York. Diphtheria was once the great killer of American children, while smallpox infected, but luckily did not kill, both Washington and Lincoln. Thoreau, Hawthorne, Poe and Eleanor Roosevelt died from tuberculosis. Yellow fever shut down the Federal government in the then capitol of Philadelphia, forcing Alexander Hamilton to flee to an involuntary quarantine. Al Capone would succumb to syphilis while his nemesis, Eliot Ness, led the campaign against the disease in the American army in WWII. More modern afflictions, inc