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Book Review
| Plague Ports: The Global Urban Impact of Bubonic Plague, 1894–1901. By MYRON ECHENBERG. New York: New York University Press, 2007. 349 pp. $48.00 (cloth).
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Reading Myron Echenberg's detailed report about the global plague epidemic at the turn of the twentieth century, it is hard to escape paraphrasing on Tolstoy's famous opening sentence for Anna Karenina. While it's not sure whether healthy cities are all alike, it is clear that every unhealthy city is unhealthy in its own way. |
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Plague Ports examines ten case studies of port cities (Hong Kong, Bombay, Sydney, Honolulu, San Francisco, Porto, Alexandria, Cape Town, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires) hit by bubonic plague in the wake of the world's third documented world plague pandemic that occurred between the years 1894 and 1901. Based on a wide selection of primary and secondary literature, Echenberg's book provides a thorough and detailed account of the plague's development in each of these cities. The book is edited as a series of independent stories, which together provide different and varied viewpoints of that global event. On the one hand, it shows the particular aspects of each city and the differences between the plague's trajectories in each. It seems, for instance, that a huge chasm separates the civil cooperation among all the religious and national groups in Alexandria from the racist and paternalistic attitude of the authorities toward black people in Cape Town. On the other hand, the book clearly reveals repeating similarities between different cities in distant continents, such as the use of ethnic minorities and immigrants as scapegoats, alienation between different social classes, central and local governments simultaneously promoting contradictory policies, and heated debates between different medical schools. |
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