‘In the end,” writes Simon Schama at the beginning of his extraordinary book on pandemics old and new, “all history is natural history.” Foreign Bodies is ostensibly an account of the bacteriologists and epidemiologists who studied the natural history of infectious diseases from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries, developing vaccines and saving millions from smallpox, cholera and the plague. But as its subtitle suggests, it is also a reflection on the political and scientific conflicts of the Covid pandemic, and the failure of contemporary leaders to coordinate a scientifically driven global response to the virus.
Over millennia, biological and environmental imperatives rather than states and empires have shaped human destiny. Now capitalism’s degradation of the planet threatens our future survival. Zoonosis – the transmission of infectious diseases from animals to humans – has always bedevilled humanity, but the risks are increasing as we encroach further into natural habitats. The Global Virome project estimates that there are more than half a million unknown viruses with zoonotic potential; since 1980 sub-equatorial regions have experienced viral outbreaks every eight months; the Sars epidemic of 2003–4 has now been traced back to dragon-tiger-phoenix soup, a combination of palm civet meat, chrysanthemum petals and snake served in restaurants in southern China. If these facts are sobering, the response of our politicians, described with measured fury by Schama, is terrifying: now as before, international cooperation founders as national tribalism belittles science and its “cosmopolitan” practitioners.
