About this item
A vibrant cultural history investigating pandemics and vaccines, by bestselling author and historian Simon SchamaCities and countries engulfed by panic and death, desperate for vaccines but fearful of what inoculation may bring. This is what the world has just gone through with Covid-19. But as Simon Schama shows in his epic history of vulnerable humanity caught between the terror of contagion and the ingenuity of science, it has happened before.Characteristically, Schama's message is delivered through gripping, page-turning stories set in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: smallpox strikes London; cholera hits Paris; plague comes to India. Threading through the scenes of terror, suffering and hope - in hospitals and prisons, palaces, and slums - are an unforgettable cast of characters: a philosopher-playwright burning up with smallpox in a country chateau; a vaccinating doctor paying house calls in Halifax; a woman doctor in south India driving her inoculator-carriage through the stricken streets as dead monkeys drop from the trees.
About the Author
Simon Schama was born in 1945. The son of a textile merchant with Lithuanian and Turkish grandparents, he spent his early years in Leigh-on-Sea in Essex. When his parents moved to London he won a scholarship to Haberdashers' Aske's School where his two great loves were English and History. Forced to choose between the two he opted to read history at Christ's College, Cambridge. Here he was taught by Sir John Plumb whose other students: Linda Colley, Roy Porter and John Brewer are now central to British historical thought. It was Plumb's influence which instilled in him the importance of narrative and written style in order to gain an audience for history outside academia. One of the hallmarks of Schama's work is his flair for description: 'he gets arcane matters to walk, in fact dance, off the page' according to fellow historian Peter Hennessy. However, his approach is contentious and invites criticism of subjectivity and populism from academic circles. Schama remained at Christ's for 10 years after his degree, becoming a fellow and then director of Studies, before moving to Brasenose College Oxford. While at Oxford he wrote (1977) , which won the Wolfson Literary Award, and (1979) . At Oxford he met his wife, Ginny Papaioannou a geneticist from California. Tired of the Oxford system (he once described his experience as being 'like a gerbil on a treadmill') and enticed by the freedom of US Academic life, he moved to America in 1980, becoming Professor of History at Harvard. Here he wrote (1989) and (1991) : an a unusual linking of the death of General Wolfe at Quebec in 1759 and the murder of a doctor, George Parkman, by a Harvard Professor in 1849. , which was written at lightening speed: 900 pages in only 18 months, won the 1990 NCR Book Award. However, Schama's emphasis on the terror and violence of the revolution and his argument, that from its beginning it was a '', ensured it has never found a publisher in France. He is now professor in history and art history at Columbia where he has written (1996) which received the W H Smith Literary Award and Rembrandt's Eyes (1999) . The latter is a controversial reassessment of the artist which attempts to reinstate the notion of Rembrandt the genius, aiming to invoke the atmosphere as well as the historical context. In Schama's view, as he tells David D'Arcy in Art Newspaper 'Simon Schama has also worked for the BBC on a 16 part series: '' and has been an art critic and cultural essayist for and magazine. He lives in New York with his wife and their two children Chloe and Gabriel.
