Encyclopedia of Pestilence, Pandemics, and Plagues

Infectious diseases have had a terrible effect upon human existence. The Old Testament is full of references to plagues and pestilence. In Europe, something like half of the population in affected areas died of the Black Death in just five years in the middle of the fourteenth century. Later, colonizers carried the variola virus (smallpox) to the new worlds of America, Australasia and Southern Africa where it decimated the indigenous populations. Cholera was the “quintessential epidemic disease of the nineteenth century”, affecting particularly the crowded industrializing urban areas where clean water and good sanitation were largely absent. These diseases are...