Eloquent, discursive ... Schama wisely avoids reportage, which is still evolving, and leans, instead, into the past, crafting a play in three acts: smallpox, cholera and bubonic plague ... Casts familiar and lesser-known figures in a fresh light ... Sterling cultural history, but it also reminds us that political concerns mold our choices as future pandemics brew.
The appearance of yet another enthusiastic and erudite history from Simon Schama is an event always to be welcomed ... A thinly painted veil of a biography of one saintly and only half-remembered scientist who battled two of the most wicked of the maladies, succeeding in both cases in stopping them in their tracks by his cleverly home-brewed vaccines ... The book ends with a flourish of well-directed support for the beleaguered Anthony Fauci, and with a fascinating and quite unexpected paean to the Atlantic horseshoe crab, and how its vividly blue blood has long played so crucial a role in the manufacture of modern vaccines. But these two tales seem more like phoned-in afterthoughts.
The author, a wide-ranging historian and an engaging television host, reconciles the weight of medical detail with the light-footed pleasures of narrative discovery. His book profiles some of the unsung miracle workers of modern vaccination, and offers a subtle rumination on borders political and biological.
Simon Schama’s Foreign Bodies,...subtitle seems to promise a distinguished historian’s sweeping, century-spanning dissection of pandemics, vaccines, and public health. That turns out to be misdirection. Schama is a prodigious researcher and an often eloquent stylist. But readers interested in the sociology or epidemiology of plagues, or the science of vaccines, should look elsewhere ... A dense, sprawling hodge-podge of detail and anecdote, Foreign Bodies rambles across time and space without sufficient focus or discipline.
Schama pulls delightfully diverse strands...and ties them into a neat bow ... The book delivers. The scope starts wide but sharpens its focus quickly, with Schama cleverly restricting his analysis to three major epidemics and roughly a hundred year span ... Surprisingly, given it was clearly written under the exigencies of lockdown, reading this book did not trigger Covid fatigue. In contrast, it felt oddly edifying to have our pandemic placed proportionately in historical context ... There is much to learn from this urgent and endlessly erudite book.
Schama...is not the obvious or best qualified person to tell these stories. Nonetheless, he has done a superb job of distilling the secondary literature ... Schama’s passion for his subject sometimes get the better of him.
...extraordinary ... 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 ... if societies are to fortify themselves for a zoonotic future they will need to rely on exiles and émigrés, cosmopolitan and liminal individuals, those benign 'foreign bodies' Schama describes with such careful attention. There are, in fact, 'no foreigners, only familiars, only a single precious chain of connection that we snap at our utmost peril,' he declares. In doing so, he makes an urgent case for building a better future on our toxic past.
Foreign Bodies isn’t about the recent pandemic, but the reader soon realizes that once covid ambushed the world in 2020, Fauci, Paul, and others were fated to reprise roles written long ago and acted many times ... he engagingly investigates science vs. germs — smallpox in the 1700s, cholera and plague in the 1800s. It’s not a full account, however, even for the period covered. Edward Jenner, inventor of the smallpox vaccine, is barely mentioned, and Louis Pasteur is unavoidable but flits in and out. Instead, Schama is interested in lesser-known bug-seekers slighted by history.
[An] epic and impassioned history ... Though Schama’s richest materials are to do with vaccination, Foreign Bodies ultimately tilts at a bigger target: how medical knowledge and political force intersect to fight epidemic disease ... With the aplomb of a young AJP Taylor, Schama neatly balances the obligation to disparage empire with the historian’s love of valorous action.
[A] splendid and often moving work of history ... Foreign Bodies is also an essay in the history of scientific discovery, with a scholarly determination to avoid superficial eureka moments. And Schama has a gift for combining novelistically colorful detail, serious analysis, and wryly amusing asides.
[A] fascinating story of vaccines’ spread ... In tracing the transmission of this idea, Mr Schama’s gaze moves from China to colonial Europe. He highlights forgotten characters, including a Greek woman who was one of the earliest and most prolific public-health servants, inoculating more than 4,000 patients herself and causing no ill effects. Along the way, readers meet vaccination’s most regular traveling companion—distrust.
This is a broad canvas, but Schama, a diligent and experienced historian, keeps the narrative on track, and he has a good eye for illustrative anecdotes. It adds up to a strong story that, in the shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic, speaks to us all. A vivid account of the horror of epidemics and the breakthroughs that can bring them under control.
