Caught between the great epidemics of the past and the horrors of the world war, the 1918-1919 flu has long struggled to be recognized as a major health disaster. Reactions to the current epidemic testify to the persistence of denial in the face of troubling outbreaks of disease.
We seem to struggle to take the measure of the Covid-19 pandemic. Its onset was sudden, its effects are uncertain and its long term consequences are still unpredictable. Books & Ideas gathers a selection of texts exploring the various facets of epidemics.
What are Covid-19 and the coronavirus? What are the parameters, causes and effects of this disease? What are the short and long-term prospects? Infectious disease specialist Philippe Sansonetti explains why the fate of the epidemic is in our hands.
Patrick Zylberman examines how the concept of health security has developed over the last thirty years, focusing nowadays on global pandemics and the threat of bioterrorism. Such threats, which transcend national borders, require new surveillance systems to be put in place and call into question the very nature of state sovereignty.
Bodies that are excluded, ill, damaged: this is often the first glimpse that a historian gets of men and women in the past. Philippe Artières talks about the physical and emotional experience that this creates: “Their history flows through my body.” The writing of history is influenced by other people’s suffering, but also by our own.
