Watts, Sheldon :

Sheldon Watts is a former senior lecturer in history at the University of Ilorin, Nigeria and visiting associate professor of history at the American University in Cairo.

�This trenchant book provides a salutary antidote to world health complacency, past and present.�

--Roy Porter, The Times (London)

�Watts� . . . mastery of six centuries of Western-influenced infectious disease and sanitation history is impressive. He also writes with authority about the pre-modern and modern medical profession.�

--Claire Panosian, Los Angeles Times Book Review

�Watts offers solid, stunning examples of Western idiocy that created superhighways for once-obscure microbes, leading to horrendous epidemics. . . . His is a perspective that Western, particularly Caucasian, policy-makers would do well to comprehend.�

--Laurie Garrett, Foreign Affairs

�The convenience of so much history of diseases in one place is obvious. [An] engrossing book.�

--Gert Brieger, M.D., New England Journal of Medicine

�An important contribution to our understanding of the history of disease, public health, and imperialism.�

--Suzanne Austin Alchon, American Historical Review

Yale University Press Web Site, April, 2002

This book is a major and wide-ranging study of the great epidemic scourges of humanity--plague, leprosy, smallpox, syphilis, cholera, and yellow fever/malaria--over the last six centuries. It will become the standard account of the way diseases arising through chance, through reckless environmental change engineered by man, or through a combination of each were interpreted in Western Europe and in the colonized world.