In A History of the World In Six Plagues: How Contagion, Class and Captivity Shape Us, from Cholera to Covid-19, the writer and journalist Edna Bonhomme demands a reckoning: which sick people get to be cured, and which just get kept away from the healthy?
For each of the title’s six plagues – cholera, sleeping sickness, Spanish flu, HIV/AIDS, Ebola and Covid – Bonhomme provides wide-ranging accounts of how people have negotiated both the biological and social effects of disease over the last 200 years.
She introduces us to contemporary Liberians struggling under the weight of a militarised quarantine; she shows us how Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway was born out of the ravages of war and illness. Ahead of the German release from Ullstein Verlag this month, we sat down with Bonhomme to talk about writing a book at the intersection of science, literature and history.
How did you come to write this book – and on these six diseases?
As someone who’s been trained in the history of science, biology and public health, portions of the book have lived within me and my work for a long time. At the same time, specific elements of the book that cleaved through the relationship between contagion and captivity, were born during the height of the Covid pandemic and the lockdown. I was trying to make sense of why outbreaks cause social or political upheaval, why people resist public health policies, and how people provide care to each other even if they’re in very vulnerable states.
At the same time, it’s not a Covid book. It’s a book that aims to get people interested in thinking about how diseases were handled before we had access to antibiotics and vaccines, how people exercised agency even if they were enslaved, the ways people wrote about their illness, and how a contagion could impact people for more than several decades. The diseases, in a sense, found me.
The book begins and ends with cholera, first on plantations in the US and then in prisons in contemporary Haiti. What is it about cholera that you find particularly instructive?
I was trying to make sense of why outbreaks cause social or political upheaval
In a way, cholera is that ex-partner that keeps coming back when you just don’t want it. It’s such a robust disease: it can live in the water, it can replicate in people’s bodies, it can act quickly. But it’s also quite preventable. Even though cholera was a gut-wrenching pandemic in the 19th century, it was eventually eradicated by the rise of public health and sanitary water systems.
In the contemporary context, cholera is a good example of what happens when people don’t have access to public health, when there isn’t clean water available, and when people are subject to militarisation. The UN’s military occupation of Haiti in the 2010s, MINUSTAH, actually created the conditions for cholera to spread. Without universal healthcare or sanitary sewage system, the disease flourished and has continued to do so.
It then had a resurgence in 2022 at the Haitian National Penitentiary because those who were incarcerated were deemed less worthy than those who were free. I start the chapter with the plantation, a site where enslaved people were also considered less-than. These institutions – slavery, mass incarceration – perpetuate disease and illness.
How would you summarise the argument of the book overall?
Cholera is that ex-partner that keeps coming back when you just don’t want it. It’s such a robust disease
The book is about how we can be better as humans. When I studied biology and worked in a lab after graduating from university, I loved the process of doing rigorous experiments, repeating them to make sure they were valid, finding a pattern. And yet, those scientific advancements are not always something that everyone benefits from. We have made heaps of progress with respect to the origins of infectious diseases and figuring out how to minimise their spread, but moving forward we can hopefully ensure that medication is more evenly distributed, that communities are informed about public health policies in a more democratic fashion, and that we are giving people tools to know how to better take care of their health, without shaming them. It shouldn’t be an individualised thing, which is so often what western societies might think is important. It’s through collective action that we’ve made the most gains with respect to public health.
What was the research process like for this book? Do you feel like your background in the natural sciences gives you a different perspective than the great thinkers you’re referencing in this book, who are mostly philosophers or historians?
As someone who’s been trained in natural sciences like biology and soft sciences like history, I have been so grateful but also privileged to learn how to activate different parts of my brain. I wanted to write a book that wasn’t just a history book, or just a science book, or just literary criticism. I wanted it to be all of those things. So I read a lot of novels. I also interviewed people: activists, scientists, public health officials. I pored over newspapers. I did archival work, both physical and digital. It took years.
Being able to work between data, people and literature also meant moving between different spaces and forms of consciousness. There is a rigidity that can occur in the scientific world, especially if you’re doing laboratory work, because you have to really train yourself to have order and a particular structure. So I have to fight against being rigid in certain cases, and to learn how to experiment. Also, in spite of what people might think of the lone scientific genius – someone like Albert Einstein – most scientists work in teams, not as individuals.
Writing is actually the most isolating field that I’ve ever been engaged in. Being social as a writer is not what people imagine – hanging out in cafes, smoking cigarettes. That is not what’s happening. Sometimes I’m part of a literary scene, but because of my ethnic and class background, I’m a bit marginal when it comes to the literary world in Germany. Writing can be solitary.
The book itself is very social, aimed at how people interact and relate to each other. Your Covid chapter, in particular, is structured around three profiles of Black women living in Germany. How did thinking through the pandemic with these three women make you think differently?
We have to think more deeply about what Europe owes to Africa for the extraction of resources and millions of its people
Germany’s assimilationist project can be inviting for some people, but can also mean that to be accepted means to silence and erase a portion of yourself, at least in the public sphere. And so part of what I wanted to express in the Covid chapter is that there are people of African descent – who have many ethnic, national and linguistic backgrounds – who are here, and they have made Germany their home. And they were trying to make sense of not just the novel coronavirus but how to live in this world. By interviewing them over a few years, I was able to get a sense of their worlds, beyond the superficial way that some Germans might think of Blackness and Black people. I hope, with that chapter, that readers can see that not only do Black people reside in Germany, but that there’s a complexity to that lived experience, that it’s not always about suffering. They’re inspirational people. They find beauty and love, even in places that may not urge them to flourish.
You have another chapter about Robert Koch and his experimentation on Tanzanians infected with sleeping sickness, a disease spread by the tsetse fly. We know him mostly as the namesake of the Robert Koch Institute: the new name for the Royal Prussian Institute for Infectious Diseases, which ran experiments in Tanzania during the colonial period. When did you learn about Koch’s history?
I first discovered Robert Koch when I studied biology in high school. We learned the Koch postulates, [the four criteria] which allow us to understand germ theory. Infectious diseases emerge from a microorganism, such as a bacteria or virus, and Koch was the person who helped us really comprehend this area of study. This is his positive legacy, as someone who contributed something pivotal to our understanding of microbes.
My other perspective on Robert Koch, this colonial dimension, is something that I learned from living in Germany, from speaking to activists, from seeing his statue, and from going to the archives and reading his materials at the Wellcome Library in London. It also opened me up to Germany’s other colonial projects, particularly in Namibia, and the people there – the Herero and Nama – who are still trying to advocate for their own sovereignty and the bones and artefacts of their ancestors. We have to think more deeply about what Europe owes to Africa for the extraction of resources and millions of its people. As a descendant of enslaved people, I’m a byproduct of that extraction process. How do we make sense of that? How do we remember, and how do we repair the damage that was done?
Is Berlin a good place for thinking about these issues?
Being a migrant, I have to constantly think about my role and my relationship to this land and the genocide that it has caused, as well as how it is currently complicit in other forms of injustices globally. Being in Berlin has taught me to make the time to speak with people who know more than me on these subjects, to read, to learn, to admit my own humility when it comes to certain histories, and then to also learn how to be in solidarity.
There is a material benefit that comes from a country that actually offers things like paid time off for people, sick leave, healthcare. There’s a lot of green space in Berlin compared to New York City, and that makes a world of difference. I have a writing group here that meets monthly. My friends will have readings and comedy shows, and we’re able to learn from each other. We have the time and the space to do that, which is not always possible for writers from working-class backgrounds who live in Paris, London and New York.
Do you think the reception will be different in German?
I can’t speak to the Mentalität of the 84 million Germans who may potentially want to read my book, because I am not German – at least not yet. But I can imagine that the chapters on Germany might get the most pushback from Germans, because from my experience, Germans do not like Americans telling them about their history. At the same time, I could see people being open, and thinking, ‘Oh wow, I should learn more. Not just about Robert Koch, but about German colonialism on the African continent.’ If they’re compelled by my writing, and if they’re interested in thinking about this country beyond the history that they were taught, then they might actually enjoy it. So we’ll see.
If there was one thing that you would want readers to come away from the book thinking differently about, what would it be?
I would hope that people would read more, just in general. Obviously, I would love people to read my book, but I would hope that people would read more peer-reviewed scientific articles, that they would read more novels, that they would read histories that actually show what happens when people don’t get vaccinated, and what happens when people don’t have access to hospitals and healthcare. I think one of the benefits of being a historian is being able to see how an outbreak in Tanzania might have been prevented if people had taken certain measures, or how incarcerated people have fought for the right to healthcare. I also hope that people can really try as much as possible to not sit with cynicism and to unlearn despair. It’s not a self-help book. If anything, people might come out of it thinking, ‘Wow, those are pretty tough plagues out there.’ But I hope they can think about ways we can learn from the past, but also create structures to create a better future.
- A History of the World In Six Plagues: How Contagion, Class and Captivity Shape Us, from Cholera to Covid-19 is out now from Simon & Schuster
