Ending Epidemics

Richard Conniff

Preface: The Healing ix
1 What the Draper Saw 1
2 Deadly Preconceptions 11
3 Foreign Bodies 17
4 Precursors 25
5 Ridiculous Diseases, Inconceivable Ideas 31
6 Buying the Pox 39
7 Slaying the Speckled Monster 51
8 An Angel's Trumpet 59
9 The Great Sanitary Awakening 69
10 Finding Pathogens 81
11 The Semmelweis Reflex 89
12 Making Sense of Cholera 99
13 The Broad Street Pump 109
14 Louis Pasteur: The Rising 119
15 The Subtle Foe 131
16 The Mystery of the Cursed Meadows 137
17 A New Vaccine 145
18 The Bible of Bacteriology 155
19 Defining the Indefinable Something 161
20 (Re)discovering Cholera 171
21 A Sacred Delirium 179
22 Immunity and the Strangling Angel 191
23 Deadly Carriers 205
24 The Beast in the Mosquito 213
25 Fit for Duty 223
26 A Pathogen too Far 233
27 Midnight Work 239
28 The Antibacterial Revolution 249
29 Penicillin 257
30 Race to the Vaccine 271
31 Zero Pox 289
Epilogue: The Plague Next Time 305
Acknowledgments 311
Notes 313
Index 341