The COVID-19 pandemic was/is a curious time for historians of medicine and public health. A moment when our work became immediately and uncomfortably relevant to an especially wide audience as people looked to the past to make sense of the present. In this richly sourced book, David Arnold decolonizes these pandemic histories and centers India as pandemic source and site, as laboratory and observational space.
Arnold begins by situating his book against the broader scholarship, but he also explores what a pandemic means and settles on four broad “pandemic propositions”: that pandemics are recurring historical phenomena; that pandemics have spatial and temporal presence; that pandemics are exceptional events; and last, that they are both subjective and epidemiological phenomena. His first case study is, appropriately enough, cholera, the “first modern pandemic” (38). Cholera's emergence as a pandemic in the nineteenth century is undeniably intertwined with the histories of the British Empire...
