Great men don’t shape history – but tiny microbes do

On Tuesday afternoons, pathology teaching at medical school required me to peer down a microscope for two hours, screwing my inactive eye ever more tightly shut as if that would make the looking eye suddenly see clearly. Each eosin-stained slide with its pink and purple lines and splodges of diseased cells was as legible to me as a barcode. The tiny world beneath my lens created an illusion of human supremacy, a world where the truth was small, immobilised and bored of itself.

Pathogenesis – the cause of disease, its development and the impact it has on cells and organisms – is thankfully not what Pathogenesis is about. Jonathan Kennedy is a sociologist, not a microbiologist, and his unit of interest is the epidemic event, not the single bacterium. Where tales of great white men, great inventions and great power once populated the history books, Kennedy argues that great plagues are what really matter.