Renlei wenming de bengjie yu chongsheng: Quan qiu fangyi zhuanjia, Niujin daxue Make Halisen (Mark Harrison) jiaoshou fangtanlu 人類文明的崩解與重生：全球防疫專家 — 牛津大學馬克 ・哈里森 Mark Harrison 教授訪談錄 [ Breakdown or Breakthrough? Interviews with an Expert on Epidemics, Oxford University Professor Mark Harrison] (review)

Mark Harrison, a well-known scholar of British colonial medicine who has written histories of wartime public health, has never before stepped so far into the public spotlight. Over the course of a series of interviews with Shih-Pei Hung, Harrison carefully presents his experience of growing up in a working-class town and his longing for something better. By drawing a scholar from his academic armature and presenting his ideas as part of his own life story, the book offers new ways of thinking about a leading historian of science.

The book is in three parts. In the first part, which is largely autobiographical, Harrison portrays the collapse of an old community in an increasingly commercialized world. Hung elaborates the statement that international trade is wrapped materialism, an ideology that must eventually destroy the norms and social values of small communities. As an adult, Harrison is aware of how the childhood experience of seeing his community transformed drove him to become a scholar. It now seems that the faster trade that brought so many changes to Britain’s small towns undermined essential virtues and norms while hastening the transmission of diseases. Citing the super influenzas that have recently whipped around the globe, Harrison reveals the real motive that drove him to write his latest book, Contagion: How Commerce Has Spread Disease.

The second part of the book under review is titled “Freezing Winters and Other Challenges,” and there Harrison expresses a deep concern that human civilization will vanish if we do not acknowledge our previous mistakes and apply the lessons we can draw from them. One thematic concern is transitions. Global warming, dwindling natural resources, and spiritual restlessness indicate the crossroads that human beings are facing. However, Harrison’s attitude is optimistic, and he encourages readers to consider this a chance to choose a remarkable future. A revival of the earlier discussion of influenza permits Harrison to suggest that the modern world’s commercialization of and overconfidence in biomedicine are taking us in the wrong direction; we ought to pin our faith to traditional medicine. As Hung complements Harrison’s description of Western medicine’s traditional humoralism with the Chinese concept of food supplements, interviewer and interviewee build links between different methods of self-strengthening, offering hope for a better world. They emphasize that every effort to bring positive change to a world in transition should be done with a sincere heart. This will permit the world to see the beauty beyond so many of today’s pains and worries.

This hopeful outlook also characterizes the third part of the book, “Welcome the Glimmerings of Dawn.” Starting with a discussion of the core value of community building, Hung and Harrison agree that cultivating positive interactions among neighbors can reduce the mutual distrust too often found in modern cities and towns. The simple activities that can ease mutual distrust are essential, warns Harrison, because suspicions can fester, leading to hate crimes or even more violent conflicts. Wars have broken out over such problems. This plea is supported by the addition to the book of a translation of Harrison’s article on community gardens. Such gardens are but one of several efforts to build community away from zones created and sustained by commerce. The beauty of community building is everywhere around us—and entirely in our hands. Additional blueprints for a better global village emerge over the latter part of the conversation in this part.

As a historian of disease, I was particularly touched by the discussion of super influenza. In 2005 B. Lee Ligon published an article titled “Avian Influenza Virus H5N1: A Review of Its History and...