Viruses, Plagues, and History (review)

Michael B. A. Oldstone. Viruses, Plagues, and History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. xi + 211 pp. Ill. $25.00.

Michael Oldstone has written a book for the general reader that makes explicit the inextricable interaction of disease and society. Focusing on the major viral diseases afflicting humankind, he has felicitously integrated synoptic views of their history and their science. His book, as he explains in the preface, "was conceived in the spirit of Paul de Kruif's Microbe Hunters" (p. ix), which induced many young people, including Oldstone, to elect a career in biomedicine. Oldstone's tempered and generally well-researched account is a welcome balance to de Kruif's overdrawn characters and the plague of plague books that have infected recent best-seller lists.

The book is divided into three parts: an introduction that presents in lay terms the general principles of virology and immunology; a second section, called "Success Stories," that chronicles smallpox, yellow fever, measles, and poliomyelitis--four viral diseases that "science has harnessed despite the unrestrained devastation and misery they once caused" (p. ix); and a final part, "Present and Future Challenges," which provides an overview of emerging viral diseases as well as short chapters on Lassa fever, Ebola, hantavirus, AIDS/HIV disease, influenza, and mad cow disease and other spongiform encephalopathies. In the brief conclusion, Oldstone points to "the great legacy" that modern microbe hunters have left since the 1920s when de Kruif's book was first published, in the development of vaccines against measles, yellow fever, and poliomyelitis, and he seems to have faith that such scientific victories will continue. Such optimism is necessary to sustain researchnfectious diseases. But it is counterbalanced by the sad truth that "old" diseases such as malaria and "new" diseases such as AIDS continue to take a terrifying toll in the developing world.

Historians will quickly pick up the theme of scientific triumphalism that runs throughout this book. Not surprisingly, Oldstone writes as the virologist and scientific advisor that he is. (He is director of the laboratory of immunobiology at the Scripps Research Institute, and a member of the World Health Organization committee on the eradication of measles and polio viruses.) What, then, does his book offer to the historian and the general public? Quite a bit. Despite his lack of formal historical training, he has done a fine job of integrating the history and science of major viral diseases into stories that are interesting and accessible to a wide audience. Working from more than occasional primary sources and a wide array of secondary ones, he presents arresting historical vignettes of diseases and investigators. These histories move episode-by-episode through the centuries, focusing initially on individual achievement rather than details of past scientific research. Quotations, sometimes from new sources, enliven the accounts, but suffer historiographically from the absence of page references to the works cited. As Oldstone's history of a specific viral disease moves into the postwar decades and the period of his own scientific career, the science story grows to dominate the historical.

Oldstone's personal friendship with many of the scientists involved in the recent research that he describes has its pitfalls. Because in many cases he has the advantage of personal communication with these investigators, he is able to include information not readily available to others. At other times, one suspects that friendship has led to a less-than-complete historical account. A glaring example is his bland treatment of the isolation and identification in 1983-84 of the virus implicated in AIDS by the research groups of the Pastorian Luc Montagnier and the American Robert Gallo--both listed in the preface as personal acquaintances. He makes no mention of Gallo's fierce contention for priority and prestige, or of the highly publicized battle that ensued over control of the lucrative patent on HIV diagnostic tests.

The historian might also wish for some comment on changing concepts of the virus over the...