Book Review: History Smashers: Plagues and Pandemics* by Kate Messner, published October 5, 2021, recommended for ages 8-12 or grades 3-7 (but provides some great information for everybody) Please note: this book is not yet in the Pageturner library and will require student requests in order for purchases to be made.
Although widespread disease is first mentioned in The Epic of Gilgamesh some 2,000 years B.C.E., and although remnants of malaria have been found in 6,000-year old Egyptian mummies, the first recorded epidemic (4) was noted by Thucydides in ancient Greece in about 430 B.C.E. Thucydides meticulously recorded his own symptoms, and today we think the Plague of Athens was an outbreak of measles. Alexander the Great conquered the known world by the time he was 31 but also succumbed, within two weeks, to typhoid from contaminated water that same year. Ms. Kessner’s authoritative book for children begins here and moves swiftly to describe microbes: bacteria and viruses, that cause contagious diseases. Throughout, there are engaging drawings irresistible to young readers, and I enjoyed them, too.
Although widespread disease is first mentioned in The Epic of Gilgamesh some 2,000 years B.C.E., and although remnants of malaria have been found in 6,000-year old Egyptian mummies, the first recorded epidemic (4) was noted by Thucydides in ancient Greece in about 430 B.C.E. Thucydides meticulously recorded his own symptoms, and today we think the Plague of Athens was an outbreak of measles. Alexander the Great conquered the known world by the time he was 31 but also succumbed, within two weeks, to typhoid from contaminated water that same year. Ms. Kessner’s authoritative book for children begins here and moves swiftly to describe microbes: bacteria and viruses, that cause contagious diseases. Throughout, there are engaging drawings irresistible to young readers, and I enjoyed them, too.
Most of us are aware that in the Middle Ages Europe suffered through a deadly bubonic plague, which raised deep purple lumps on its victims’ bodies. The disease was named for those lumps, which could grow to the size and color of black plums. (1) Most of us also ‘know’ all about those long-beaked masks doctors wore during the bubonic plague, right? Except they didn’t. Those beaked masks were a figment in stories later expanded upon in films--but they were not a thing during the 14th c. plague. You can see the product of vivid imaginations here: https://www.ministryofmasks.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/1.5-1.jpg
For centuries, nobody knew what caused bubonic plague; theoretical guesses ranged as far as the human imagination could venture. One theory in particular astonished me, although on second thought it seems quite typical of those times, as well as, sadly, our own. “Henry Knighton…wrote a whole book about his ideas on the plague. He blamed it on a bunch of women who were running around dressed like men and performing at tournaments. Henry Knighton was upset because these women were doing all sorts of manly things like spending money and holding weapons, not to mention wearing pants. According to Henry, God was obviously angry about this and sent the plague as punishment. Okay, Henry.” Historically, it’s been impossible for some men, and women, to relieve themselves of the Old Testament’s condemnation of women for-- wanting to be smarter.
In the mid-1700s, smallpox swept through America and Britain. “The symptoms of smallpox, or the “speckled monster” as it was known in 18th-century England, appeared suddenly and the sequelae were devastating. The case-fatality rate varied from 20% to 60% and left most survivors with disfiguring scars.” --Excerpted from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1200696/
In the mid-1700s, smallpox swept through America and Britain. “The symptoms of smallpox, or the “speckled monster” as it was known in 18th-century England, appeared suddenly and the sequelae were devastating. The case-fatality rate varied from 20% to 60% and left most survivors with disfiguring scars.” --Excerpted from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1200696/
When Edward Jenner discovered that a living sample of a lesser form of the disease, cowpox, could be effective as a vaccine when scratched into arms, people refused to believe it. Once again, many blamed smallpox on women! Dairy maids, whose job it was to milk cows, often contracted cowpox and easily survived; to some, this indicated some grave evil in these women. As it occurs today, too, greed was often the impetus for outright denial of clear evidence. “…[A]nti-vaccine people made up outlandish stories. They said that it was unnatural to take something from cows and inject it into humans, claiming that vaccination would result in… well… weird things happening. One guy suggested Jenner’s vaccine might result in the ladies of Britain running out to canoodle with bulls in the fields. Seriously. Someone said that. His name was Benjamin Mosely, and he was a doctor who was involved in traditional inoculations that he was going to stop making so much money if Jenner’s cowpox vaccine replaced it.” Mosely ingeniously married the wickedness of women to the seeming incongruity of saving people from disease by "infecting" them with one. The latter argument is still a frequent objection made by anti-vaxxers today, although in today’s ‘live’ vaccines all microbes are deliberately weakened or, in medical terms, attenuated. (6)
In 1793, the nascent nation’s capital city of Philadelphia was scourged by yellow fever (so called because of its typical jaundice, turning skin yellowish). (2) Between August 1 and November 9, 1793, approximately 11,000 people contracted yellow fever there. Of that number, 5,000 people died. Many fled to the countryside; of those who remained, 20% died. Climatists such as Benjamin Rush postulated that the cause was bad air, a mistaken belief that would continue even to the 1800s, when it was called “miasma”--doctors in that later day were unaware that cholera was caused by a bacteria in contaminated water. (Btw, I highly recommend a riveting story of Dr. John Snow’s determined tracking of cholera’s source, The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, by Stephen Johnson. It’s a page turner! But I digress--back to 1793.)
It was Benjamin Rush who enjoined (required?) the Black community to care for Philadelphia’s sick and deceased. “At the urging of Benjamin Rush, the support of Philadelphia's free black community was enlisted by Absalom Jones, Richard Allen, and William Gray, a fruit seller who, along with Allen and Jones had secured support to build the African Church the previous year...In an effort to prove themselves morally superior to those who reviled them, Philadelphia's black community put aside their resentment and dedicated themselves to working with the sick and dying in all capacities, including as nurses, cart drivers, and grave diggers. Despite Rush's belief that blacks could not contract the disease, 240 of them died of the fever.” https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part3/3p1590.html Sadly, their heroism was met with vilification instead of gratitude; without evidence, the community was accused of stealing from those they had nursed and/or buried.
The cause of yellow fever wasn’t discovered until 1881, nearly a hundred years after Philly’s epidemic. A Cuban doctor, Dr. Carlos Finley, was first to suggest the culprit was the mosquito, even going so far as to identify the particular mosquito, aedes aegypti, which, due to climate change, now invades California. The Washington Post scoffed, deriding the mosquito theory as “silly.” The news agency extant today still sometimes accepts anti-science as truth. It wasn’t until 1900 that Dr. Walter Reed proved Dr. Finley’s theory. There’s been a safe, effective, lifetime vaccine for yellow fever for 80+ years, but there is still no medical treatment or cure. (3)
Then around 1918 came the Spanish flu, a true worldwide pandemic. (4) Contrary to its title, the Spanish flu didn’t start in Spain; it actually began--in Kansas. You can read how the name attached to Spain, below. (5) This flu was spread globally by the movements of infected soldiers during WWI, who also struggled to survive in unbelievably filthy environments on the battlefield. Once again, nobody knew its cause. “All public health officials could do was offer advice, which was this: “They told people to avoid crowds, use a hankie when they sneezed, and wash their hands often. They banned mass gatherings and spiting in the street. Some cities ordered quarantines or required people to wear masks in public to slow the spread of germs...Americans were still at war, so citizens were feeling patriotic and were willing to make sacrifices to slow the spread of disease. There was public pressure to do the right thing.” But then the mayor of Oakland was arrested for refusing to wear a mask; he was incensed that he should have to follow the rules like everybody else. Elsewhere, governments were concerned that disease would lower morale for the war effort; Italy shut down daily news of the flu.
When people weren’t updated, they forgot to care and no longer followed medical advice, causing outbreaks to skyrocket. Philadelphia not only allowed public gatherings, they held a parade! Within 12 months afterward, 12,000 Philadelphians had died of flu. St. Louis, on the other hand, forbade all public gatherings and had a much lower death rate--until WWI ended. They then saw a wave of flu within two weeks after the order had been lifted. “The outbreak lasted into 1919 and claimed at least 50 million lives around the world. Some scientists say that number might be closer to 100 million; it’s hard to know for sure because some hard-hit nations weren’t keeping statistics.” What we do know from history is that the advice issued was effective,
COVID, which is essentially SARS, became a pandemic in 2020, as anyone reading this review well knows. By the end of that September, more than a million people around the world had died, and millions more had lost jobs, while it fell almost exclusively to mothers to leave their jobs and stay at home when schools closed. We had a president who claimed on national TV that ingesting bleach could quickly clean out lungs and eliminate the virus; he also claimed a horse tranquilizer called Ivermectin could cure COVID. Neither claim was in any way true. He quickly derided the use of masks, the single most effective weapon to prevent the air-borne disease from spreading. And when he succumbed to COVID, he had the finest medical treatment available anywhere in the world, although he was still hospitalized for three days. In his first public appearance afterward, he stood at night, illuminated on a balcony of the White House high above reporters, dramatically ripping off his mask. Still, his voice was so hoarse he could barely speak, and he clearly had a hard time swallowing.
Today it’s estimated that Trump's incompetence resulted in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths. “The US could have averted 40% of the deaths from Covid-19, had the country’s death rates corresponded with the rates in other high-income G7 countries, according to a Lancet commission tasked with assessing Donald Trump’s health policy record.” See: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/10/us-coronavirus-response-donald-trump-health-policy By the time Trump left office, there were more than 400,000 reported COVID-19 deaths in the US. That's more Americans than the number of US troops killed during World War II. “The US leads the world in total coronavirus deaths.” https://www.businessinsider.com/analysis-trump-covid-19-response-40-percent-us-deaths-avoidable-2021-2
Of course, since this is a book for children, not much of what the president did or didn’t do is contained therein. The unfounded fears of anti-vaxxers are included, just as the myths of previous diseases were. (6) The tried and true medical advice concerning air-borne disease is, as well. That the federal government has continually failed to address long COVID, whose symptoms are crippling, can last more than two years, and mostly affect women, is not addressed. That COVID is in fact SARS and is stored in virtually all the organs of the body is not addressed, because it’s beyond what kids can or should absorb before their teens. The book DOES address how bigotry and racial hatred come to the fore whenever public health is threatened. Gays were deplored and even attacked when HIV was discovered. When hanta virus caused by infected rodent droppings caused disease in the Southwest, it was called the “Navajo disease” as a pejorative description. Trump called COVID the “China flu” to inflame our population against Asians. The hatred that comes out when a population feels threatened is included because it’s something even little kids can understand; they already know very well what bullying is.
Some adult issues are belayed for another time, as Kessner wisely chooses language, as well, according to the age range her book addresses. There’s a lot to learn even for adults, however, among the myths and superstitions that have enveloped the history of disease since before the ancient Greeks!
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*recommended by the School Library Journal, this is an NY Times bestseller. Kate Messner’s books have won accolades throughout the years: “White Read Aloud Award, Golden Kite and Crystal Kite Awards, Riverby Award for Natural History Writing, and Nerdy Book Club Awards. Kate's science themed books have also been selected as finalists for the AAAS/Subaru SB&F Prize and named to the NSTA/CBC list of Outstanding Science Trade Books for Students K-12.” --excerpted from https://katemessner.com/
(1) “These are small, bean-shaped filters in the body's immune system. A swollen lymph node is called a bubo. The word "bubonic" is describing this feature of the disease. If a person has bubonic plague, buboes appear in the armpits, groin or neck.” See: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/plague/symptoms-causes/syc-20351291
(2 ) “Yellow fever is caused by an arbovirus (a virus transmitted by vectors such mosquitoes)… These day-biting mosquitoes breed around houses (domestic), in forests or jungles (sylvatic), or in both habitats (semi-domestic). Yellow fever is a high-impact high-threat disease, with risk of international spread, which represents a potential threat to global health security…There is no specific anti-viral drug for yellow fever… Vaccination is the most important means of preventing yellow fever. The yellow fever vaccine is safe, affordable and a single dose provides life-long protection against yellow fever disease. A booster dose of yellow fever vaccine is not needed.” https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/yellow-fever
(3) "In 1951, Max Theiler of the Rockefeller Foundation received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of an effective vaccine against yellow fever—a discovery first reported in the JEM 70 years ago [this published in 2007]. This was the first, and so far the only, Nobel Prize given for the development of a virus vaccine. " https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2118520/
(3) "In 1951, Max Theiler of the Rockefeller Foundation received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of an effective vaccine against yellow fever—a discovery first reported in the JEM 70 years ago [this published in 2007]. This was the first, and so far the only, Nobel Prize given for the development of a virus vaccine. " https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2118520/
(4) “An epidemic is a disease outbreak that occurs within a specific geographical area. A pandemic, in contrast, occurs if the disease spreads to multiple areas or the entire globe. Multiple pandemics have occurred throughout history, with the COVID pandemic most recently occurring from 2020 to 2023.” https://www.health.com/condition/infectious-diseases/epidemic-vs-pandemic
(5) “Spain was one of only a few major European countries to remain neutral during World War I. Unlike in the Allied and Central Powers nations, where wartime censors suppressed news of the flu to avoid affecting morale, the Spanish media was free to report on it in gory detail. News of the sickness first made headlines in Madrid in late-May 1918, and coverage only increased after the Spanish King Alfonso XIII came down with a nasty case a week later.
Since nations undergoing a media blackout could only read in-depth accounts from Spanish news sources, they naturally assumed that the country was the pandemic’s ground zero. The Spanish, meanwhile, believed the virus had spread to them from France, so they took to calling it the “French Flu”…[T]he first known case was reported at a military base in Kansas on March 11, 1918. https://www.history.com/news/why-was-it-called-the-spanish-flu
(6) Reviews on Amazon range wildly from five stars (overall, 4.6) to one--only because those couldn't be processed as zeros. The negative reviews reveal that science has been highly politicized and castigated, to the detriment of education and the population's well-being. One review insists that the polio vaccine is causing polio in Africa, implying this is widespread when, in fact, "The oral vaccine can... cause polio in about two to four children per 2 million doses. In extremely rare cases, the weakened virus can also sometimes mutate into a more dangerous form and spark outbreaks, especially in places with poor sanitation and low vaccination levels. https://apnews.com/article/polio-burundi-epidemic-africa-vaccine-d7489fbf1bd75f8612672414d9a5f2c0. That review fails to mention that the vaccine essentially eliminated the disease in the U.S. There is no longer any American living in an iron lung; the last, who'd contracted polio in 1952, died in March, 2024, of COVID. https://www.medicalbrief.co.za/us-man-dies-after-living-in-iron-lung-for-70-years/ Another critic of this book wrote: "Absolutely disgusting. This is the exact reason I HOMESCHOOL. This is trash worthy and we will not be purchasing anymore History Smashers. Full of lies and bias [sic] opinions. Wow." https://www.amazon.com/History-Smashers-Pandemics-Kate-Messner-ebook/product-reviews/B08VFSHQ4S/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_paging_btm_next_2?ie=UTF8&reviewerType=all_reviews&pageNumber=2 (This same reviewer blasted the book for "talking down" to people, perhaps not realizing that its intended readership is 8-12 years old. That section of the review was later excised.) Home schooling allows parents to cherry-pick what their children learn, leaving them susceptible to "alternative facts" and conspiracy theories, completely unprepared for life as adults capable of critical thinking.
(6) Reviews on Amazon range wildly from five stars (overall, 4.6) to one--only because those couldn't be processed as zeros. The negative reviews reveal that science has been highly politicized and castigated, to the detriment of education and the population's well-being. One review insists that the polio vaccine is causing polio in Africa, implying this is widespread when, in fact, "The oral vaccine can... cause polio in about two to four children per 2 million doses. In extremely rare cases, the weakened virus can also sometimes mutate into a more dangerous form and spark outbreaks, especially in places with poor sanitation and low vaccination levels. https://apnews.com/article/polio-burundi-epidemic-africa-vaccine-d7489fbf1bd75f8612672414d9a5f2c0. That review fails to mention that the vaccine essentially eliminated the disease in the U.S. There is no longer any American living in an iron lung; the last, who'd contracted polio in 1952, died in March, 2024, of COVID. https://www.medicalbrief.co.za/us-man-dies-after-living-in-iron-lung-for-70-years/ Another critic of this book wrote: "Absolutely disgusting. This is the exact reason I HOMESCHOOL. This is trash worthy and we will not be purchasing anymore History Smashers. Full of lies and bias [sic] opinions. Wow." https://www.amazon.com/History-Smashers-Pandemics-Kate-Messner-ebook/product-reviews/B08VFSHQ4S/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_paging_btm_next_2?ie=UTF8&reviewerType=all_reviews&pageNumber=2 (This same reviewer blasted the book for "talking down" to people, perhaps not realizing that its intended readership is 8-12 years old. That section of the review was later excised.) Home schooling allows parents to cherry-pick what their children learn, leaving them susceptible to "alternative facts" and conspiracy theories, completely unprepared for life as adults capable of critical thinking.