Copyright © 2005 by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
BOOK REVIEWS |
The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco
Division of Epidemiology, School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-7360
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By Marilyn Chase
ISBN 0-375-75708-2, Random House, New York, New York (Telephone: 1-800-733-3000, Fax: 212-940-7381, E-mail: atrandompublicity@randomhouse.com, Website: http://www.randomhouse.com), 2004, 304 pp., $13.95 (paperback)
The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco by Marilyn Chase (1) belongs to that genre of books that provide a broad social, cultural, and historical context for epidemiologic issues. Good examples are Randy Shilts And the Band Played On, the story of the genesis of the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) epidemic in San Francisco (2), and Jane S. Smiths Patenting the Sun: Polio and the Salk Vaccine, the behind-the-scenes story of the development of the inactivated poliovirus vaccine (3). The Barbary Plague chronicles the bubonic plague epidemics of 19001904 and 19071908 in San Francisco. It is the story of a deadly epidemic, the application of new science, political chicanery, blatant
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