By the 1890s German, French, Swiss, Russian, Japanese and English bacteriologists, doctors and nurses were to be found at centres of contagion such as Hong Kong, Singapore and most notoriously Bombay. Exiles and émigrés flit between the research institutes led by Robert Koch in Berlin and Louis Pasteur in Paris before dispersing across the globe to the frontlines of cholera and plague outbreaks in the “great game of competitive medical imperialism”. We meet Adrien Proust, Marcel’s father – known as the “geographer of epidemics” – who travelled to Istanbul and Tehran, trying unsuccessfully in his 1873 essay on international hygiene to establish protocols for global public health. Schama’s varied cast includes Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the first European to inoculate her children against the disease in 1721 after learning the “Turkey way” of variolation – an early form of vaccination. When that didn’t work they were forced to turn to outsiders: migrants, exiles – the “foreign bodies” of the title – who challenged prevailing social and scientific assumptions. White, male, Christian European colonial authorities, obsessed with segregation and sanitation, doused homes with carbolic and limewash.
#Echoes of the end of the raj how to#
What can history tell us about how we got here, and how to respond in the future? The answer is conveyed through a meticulous retelling of a terrible yet scientifically innovative period, beginning with the cholera pandemics of the 1850s and taking in a three-decade epidemic of bubonic plague that by the 1920s had killed a staggering 12 million people, mostly in India. If these facts are sobering, the response of our politicians, described with measured fury by Schama, is terrifying: now as before, international cooperation founders as national tribalism belittles science and its “cosmopolitan” practitioners. The Global Virome project estimates that there are more than half a million unknown viruses with zoonotic potential since 1980 sub-equatorial regions have experienced viral outbreaks every eight months the Sars epidemic of 2003–4 has now been traced back to dragon-tiger-phoenix soup, a combination of palm civet meat, chrysanthemum petals and snake served in restaurants in southern China. Zoonosis – the transmission of infectious diseases from animals to humans – has always bedevilled humanity, but the risks are increasing as we encroach further into natural habitats. Now capitalism’s degradation of the planet threatens our future survival. Over millennia, biological and environmental imperatives rather than states and empires have shaped human destiny. But as its subtitle suggests, it is also a reflection on the political and scientific conflicts of the Covid pandemic, and the failure of contemporary leaders to coordinate a scientifically driven global response to the virus. ‘I n the end,” writes Simon Schama at the beginning of his extraordinary book on pandemics old and new, “all history is natural history.” Foreign Bodies is ostensibly an account of the bacteriologists and epidemiologists who studied the natural history of infectious diseases from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries, developing vaccines and saving millions from smallpox, cholera and the plague.
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