Contents
The Age-Old Balance between Host and Parasite
Determinants of History, Agents of Human Tragedy
The Different Paths to Progress
Why Worry in the Age of Miracles?
A Worrisome Future Is Not Inevitable
1 How the World Starts Getting Better
Death, Disease, and the Fall of Prehistoric Man
The Path to Better Health in Wealthier Nations
A Better World Begins as a More Unequal One
2 Diseases of Conquest and Colony
The Colonial and Military Roots of Global Health
The Path to Better Health in Poorer Nations
The Difference That Health Aid Makes
China’s Other Great Leap Forward
The (Potential) Dividends of Demography
Sunny in Nairobi, with a Chance of Storms
The Perils of Growing Naturally
The Growth Industry in Agadez, Niger
Migration as the History of Disease
The World Is Getting Better in Worrisome Ways
6 The Exoneration of William H. Stewart
Confronting the Complex of Multiple Causation
The Role of Aid in Adapting to the Decline of Infectious Diseases
List of Figures
Figure 0.1
Farms Road Cemetery. Photo: Richard Roberts, 2004. Courtesy of the Stamford Historical Society.
Figure 0.2
Data sources: US Census Bureau, CDC, Proquest.
Figure 1.1
AIDS activists protest in Cape Town, South Africa on November 26, 2001. Photo: Anna Zieminski/AFP/Getty Images.
Figure 1.2
Sources: McEvedy and Jones, Atlas of World Population History, 1978; Kremer, “Population Growth and Technological Change,” 1993; Williams, Cassell’s Chronology of World History 2005; Scott, Against the Grain, 2017; Bairoch, Cities and Economic Development, 1988; Morris, Why the West Rules, 2010.
Figure 1.3
Adapted from Benedictow, The Black Death 1346–1353 (2006).
Figure 1.4
Cartoon by Eugene “Zim” Zimmerman, American City 21 (Sept. 1919): 247.
Figure 1.5
Adapted from Max Roser/Our World in Data. Data source: Gapminder.
Figure 1.6
Data source: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, Global Burden of Disease (GBD), 2015.
Figure 2.1
UK supergroup Band Aid, Columbia Records (1984). Image courtesy of Andrea Bollyky Purcell, published pursuant to fair use.
Figure 2.2
The skyline of the downtown business district in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 2015. Photo: Getty Images.
Figure 2.3
Data source: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, GBD 2015.
Figure 2.4
Data source: UN Population Prospects.
Figure 2.5
Data source: World Bank, World Development Indicators.
Figure 2.6
Adapted from Soto-Pérez-de-Celis, “The Royal Philanthropic Expedition of the Vaccine,” 2008; Franco-Paredes, Lammoglia, and Santos-Preciado, “The Spanish Royal Philanthropic Expedition,” 2005.
Figure 2.7
A man spraying oil on mosquito breeding grounds in Panama. Reprinted with permission from the Library of Congress.
Figure 2.8
Theodor S. Geisel, This Is Ann: She’s Dying to Meet You. Pamphlet, Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1943.
Figure 2.9
Pasquale Caprari, WHO scientist, supervises malaria-campaign workers spraying a hut with DDT in Ghana in 1950. Photo: WHO/UN, Courtesy of WHO.
Figure 2.10
Ali Maow Maalin, who contracted the world’s last recorded case of endemic smallpox, pictured here in 1979. Photo: WHO/John F. Wickett, Courtesy of WHO.
Figure 2.11
Data source: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, Financing for Global Health (2016).
Figure 2.12
Source: Bollyky et al., Health Affairs (2017).
Figure 2.13
Data source: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, GBD 2015.
Figure 2.14
Man smoking a cigarette in Bangui, Central African Republic, on February 14, 2014. Photo: Fred Dufour/AFP/Getty Images.
Figure 2.15
Data source: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, GBD 2015.
Figure 2.16
A woman crawls toward Ebola burial team members taking the body of her sister away on October 10, 2014, in Monrovia, Liberia. Photo: John Moore/Getty Images.
Figure 2.17
Data source: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, GBD 2015.
Figure 2.18
Data source: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, GBD 2015.
Figure 3.1
Jim Grant promoting child survival at Demba Diop National Stadium in Dakar, Senegal in 1987. Photo: UNICEF/John Isaac, Courtesy of UNICEF.
Figure 3.2
Contrary to this campaign photo, most of the tedious work of eliminating snails with chopsticks was done by women and elderly, according to China scholar Miriam Gross. Song wenshen: Huace (Beijing: Zhonggong zhongyang nanfang shisan sheng, shi, qu xeufang lingdao xiaozu bangongshi, 1978), 65.
Figure 3.3
Mao (far left) consults with the Shanghai medical community on the snail fever campaign, June 1957. Song wenshen: Huace (Beijing: Zhonggong zhongyang nanfang shisan sheng, shi, qu xeufang lingdao xiaozu bangongshi, 1978), 11.
Figure 3.4
Data source: UN World Population Prospects. Adapted from: World Bank, Youth Employment in Sub-Saharan Africa (2014).
Figure 3.5
Informal industry in the Dharavi slum, Mumbai, 2016. Photo: Johnny Miller/Slum Scapes.
Figure 4.1
Traffic jam at a crowded street corner in central Dhaka, Bangladesh, February 3, 2017. Photo: Ruby Rascal.
Figure 4.2
John Edwards, owner of the Southwark Water Works, depicted as Neptune in the Thames River; with a chamber pot for a crown, a trident with dead river animals on the prongs and sewage pouring in across from the water-intake. George Cruikshank, Salus Populi Suprema Lex, 1832. Courtesy of the US National Library of Medicine.
Figure 4.3
Men at work in a crowded metal grinding shop in Derby, England, 1928. Photo: Leys Malleable Castings Company. Courtesy of the Derby Local and Family Studies Library.
Figure 4.4
The Conquest of Pestilence, Summary of Vital Statistics, 1961, The City of New York. Reprinted with the permission of the New York City Department of Health & Mental Hygiene.
Figure 4.5
David Nalin examining a patient receiving IV rehydration, prior to starting oral rehydration therapy, 1968. (Courtesy of David Nalin.)
Figure 4.6
A villager learning how to make oral rehydration solution, Bangladesh, 1981. (Courtesy of BRAC USA.)
Figure 4.7
Data source: World Bank, World Development Indicators; UN World Urbanization Prospects.
Figure 4.8
Data source: Demographia World Urban Areas (2016).
Figure 4.9
Data source: African Economic Outlook 2016. Adapted from Jedwab, Christiaensen, and Gindelsky, “Demography, Urbanization and Development: Rural Push, Urban Pull and … Urban Push?” 2015.
Figure 4.10
Data sources: World Bank, World Development Indicators; Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, GBD 2015.
Figure 4.11
Hester Street, Lower East Side slum, New York City, 1902. Photo: Benjamin J. Falk, Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Figure 4.12
The Kibera slum sits directly adjacent to the Royal Nairobi Golf Club in Kenya, 2016. Photo: Johnny Miller/Unequal Scenes.
Figure 4.13
Data source: WHO Global Urban Ambient Air Pollution Database.
Figure 5.1
Boy holding meningitis vaccine immunization card in Burkina Faso, 2010. Photo: PATH/Gabe Bienczyck, Courtesy of PATH.
Figure 5.2
Adapted from UNICEF, A Deadly Journey for Children (2017).
Figure 5.3
Immigrants from Ireland waiting in line at Ellis Island, 1911. Photo: CORBIS/Getty Images.
Figure 5.4
Data sources: Gapminder, Mexican Migration Project; World Bank, World Development Indicators.
Figure 5.5
Data source: UN World Population Prospects.
Figure 5.6
Migrants from North and Central Africa waiting in line on the southern island of Lampedusa, Italy, in 2011. Photo: Reuters/Tony Gentile.
Figure 5.7
Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators.
Figure 6.1
William H. Stewart speaks at Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health on September 18, 1968. Photo: William C. Hamilton, Courtesy of the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions.
Figure 6.2
Data sources: Armstrong, Conn, and Pinner, “Trends in Infectious Disease Mortality,” 1999; Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, GBD 2015.