| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Deadly Truth: A History of Disease in America. By Gerald N. Grob. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. xii, 349 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-674-00881-2.)

Gerald N. Grob has written a sober, engaging history of disease in North America, from before European colonization through the present. Grob focuses on what he calls the biological reality of disease: rather than exploring the ways in which disease has been interpreted, he is concerned primarily with charting morbidity and mortality. Other major works along similar lines have related disease to large-scale historical developments. Grob's book works on a different plane, comprising a series of micro-studies of the complex interplay between pathogens and their human and animal hosts that alternatively fueled and contained epidemic and endemic disease. The final impact of the book lies less in any one of these studies than in their accumulation. By the book's end, one is fully prepared to accept Grob's "deadly truth": disease is an inescapable part of life, and the dream of its eradication is utopian.

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