After I wrote the second chapter about the Black Plague, which is part of Tom’s origin story, I read a book called Pathogenesis, A History of the World in Eight Plagues, by Jonathan Kennedy. It’s a fascinating account of how diseases were mostly responsible for how conquering peoples were able to vanquish entire civilizations. For example, a huge factor in the British losing the fight with the Americans was their lack of resistance to malaria, which settlers had been exposed to and over time developed immunities to, especially in the south. Historian John McNeill drolly suggested that “the female Anopheles quadrimaculatus mosquitoes should be considered one of the founding mothers of the United States, … as malaria killed eight times more British troops than American guns.”
The book pretty much states that plagues of some sort have been here since life crawled out of the sea. In fact, they’re going on all the time, so the author focused on eight major world periods/events (from the Paleolithic to Covid) to show how pathogens have played a major part. The title isn’t by any means meant to say that those eight were the only ones to affect humankind. It’s as if he were in an aircraft and was told he could swoop down and scoop up a bit of plague info only eight times, so he chose the Paleolithc, Neolithic, Ancient, Medieval, Colonial, Revolutionary, Industrial, and recent times in history. In between all those quick touch-downs, pathogens were and are still there, alive and well.
In the context of my novel, the plague of 1348 was the biggie, but was only one of many that recurred fairly regularly for the next few hundred years.