Rats, Lice, and History
Rats, Lice, and History Books
Product Description
When Rats, Lice and History appeared in 1935, Hans Zinsser was a highly regarded Harvard biologist who had never written about historical events. Although he had published below a pseudonym, effectively all of his previous writings had dealt with infections and immunity and had appeared either in medical and scientific journals or in book format. Today he is best remembered as the author of Rats, Lice, and History, which gone through multiple editions and remains a masterpiece of science writing for a general readership.
To Zinsser, scientific research was high adventure and the investigation of infectious disease, a field of battle. Yet at the same time he maintained a like of literature and philosophy. His goal in Rats, Lice and History was to result in science, philosophy, and literature together to establish the importance of disease, and especially epidemic infectious disease, as a major force in human affairs. Zinsser cast his work as the “biography” of a disease. In his view, infectious disease simply represented an attempt of a living organism to survive. From a human perspective, an invading pathogen was abnormal; from the perspective of the pathogen it was perfectly normal.
This book is devoted to a discussion of the biology of typhus and history of typhus fever in human affairs. Zinsser starts by pointing out that the louse was the constant companion of human beings. Below certain conditions-failure to wash or to exchange clothing-lice proliferated. The typhus pathogen was transmitted by rat fleas to human beings, who then transmitted it to other humans and in some strains from human to human.
Rats, Lice and History is a tour de force. It combines Zinsser’s expertise in biology with his broad knowledge of the humanities
Hans Zinsser (1878-1940) received his doctorate at Columbia University and also was an instructor of bacteriology at Columbia University. Throughout his career he was also a professor at Stanford University as well as Harvard University. His scientific work focused on bacteriology and immunology and he is greatly associated with Brill’s disease as well as typhus.Amazon.com Review
There are few topics more distressing than disease, yet there are few books more darkly delightful than this timeless classic about the histories of microbial diseases, rats, and lice, and the scientists and doctors who combatted them. First published in 1934 and still in print, this book combines science, history, biography, literature, and other fields into an elegant but grim package of broad erudition and darker humor. Here are two representative passages.
…[T]he natural history of the rat is tragically similar to that of man … some of the more evident qualities in which rats resemble men–ferocity, omnivorousness, and adaptability to all climates … the irresponsible fecundity with which both species breed at all seasons of the year with a heedlessness of consequences, which subjects them to indiscriminate disaster on the inevitable, occasional failure of the food supply…. [G]radually, these two have spread across the earth, maintenance pace with each other and unable to ruin each other, though continually hostile. They have wandered from East to West, driven by their corporal needs, and–unlike any other species of living things–have made war upon their own kind. The gradual, relentless, progressive killing of the black rat by the brown has no parallel in nature so close as that of the similar killing of one race of man by another… …[I]nfectious disease is merely a terrible-tempered instance of a widely prevalent tendency of all living creatures to save themselves the bother of building, by their own efforts, the things they require. Whenever they find it possible to take advantage of the constructive labors of others, this is the path of least resistance. The plant does the work with its roots and its green leaves. The cow eats the plant. Man eats both of them; and bacteria (or investment bankers) eat the man….
Elsewhere in the book, Zinsser is the equal of our greatest contemporary well loved science writers, but as the above passages prove, he has a rather unique style.
Buy Cheap Rats, Lice, and History Online
Related posts:
Even a casual reading of this book turns up repeated instances of anti-Semitism (it’s the Jews fault they are persecuted, just read about their God in the Bible), racism and assorted other bigotry. Even as I’m sure conservatives of any era may possibly forgive him and even delight in sharing some of his prejudices, there is no scientific in rank in this book not readily available in more up-to-date form from other sources. His comments on the state of literature were, at the time, naive. Today, they are risible. His scholarship is appalling, unacceptable in the most well loved science work today. His snobbishness might make a reader feel a member of some exclusive club, able to translate the french and to recognize saprophyte as organisms, largely plant-like, which consume the dead. I’m here to tell you that club is not particularly exclusive and furthermore, I am not amused. I found some of the language fascinating (the use of the word kiddies in a book from the 1930s, the Kuhnian analysis of the administer of scientific exploration), but a lot more of it offensive. Don’t waste your time.
Rating: 1 / 5
This discursive, rambling instance of poor scholarship is a blight. Small justifies this book’s continued presence in print. It is anti-semitic, racist, bigoted and, in many respects, anti-intellectual. The science is out of date, and was conservative in some respects even at the time. His expeditions into other arenas show his amateur status and naivete, which masquerades as snobbishness and is, at the end of the day, merely stupid. I’m sure, for those who cannot be troubled to read better books on the many topics it covers, it serves some enlightening purpose. I’d rather it didn’t. I am unutterably appalled.
Rating: 1 / 5
Few books have inspired such a furore among historians of medicine when first introduced as did Zinsser’s “Rats, Lice and History” in 1934. The book was soundly thrashed by this audience as aimless and marginally researched (not a single footnote anywhere, for example). Today, the modern reader will find the book hopelessly self-conscious, full of a pretentious strutting forward of irrelevant literary references and obsolete medical terms. Zinnser speaks throughout in the royal ‘we,’ and never seems to ever get to the top. The first four or five chapters, in particular, are pure throat-clearing nonsense, a sleep-inducing and meandering justification of why a scientist should be allowed to write history, a straw man no one questioned him to knock down and through which the hapless reader must endure. Unfortunately, Zinnser’s book is itself the best argument hostile to that very top. Overall, just a ghastly book. Save your money and have a look at a professionally-researched and convincing history of medicine which touches on many of the issues Zinnser never quite reaches such as Mary Matossian’s “Poisons of the Past.”
Rating: 1 / 5
Having borrowed this book from the library, I exposed on the glide-leaf a bet of text written in pencil by a previous borrower — or owner. Here it is: “This book is a magnificent dose of common-sense — which the world terribly needs. Doctors (as a class) are probably the only right, sane people in the world. The book is a Tristram Shandy.” It was signed by F Hanes
Rating: 3 / 5
I’ve owned this book for decades, and keep it on the shelf reserved for books that have taught me the most. It teaches that epidemics have had a decisive influence on human history; for instance that wars cause plagues, and that for centuries many wars were resolute not by battle, but by which army’s camp first got the plague.
There have been other, equally surprising treatments of this theme. An brilliant example from the 1970’s is William McNiell’s “Plagues and Peoples”. It expands the theme to include, for instance, the role of malaria in delaying the spread of civilization to southern Plates, and that of smallpox in decimating many Native American cultures before they were even seen by Europeans. The theme is also visited in “Guns, Germs, and Steel”. Diamond suggests that many plagues, and partial immunity to them, stem from living with domestic livestock. He thinks this clarifies why European diseases devastated America, rather than the other way nearly. I’d be interested in hearing what scientific support this view has.
Rating: 5 / 5