When I was a kid, I had a book about epidemics called something like Medical Mysteries. I read it many times, fascinated by the work of epidemiologists who had figured out things like Legionnaires disease (which infected an entire conference of military vets through soggy ductwork at a hotel) and a mysterious case of poisoning in a town linked to an adulterated shipment of blue jeans.

In short, I’ve always been interested in diseases, epidemics and plagues. It’s not been incredibly thrilling to live through the present one, to put it lightly, but reading about plagues is still something I take a strange enjoyment in.

Jennifer Wright has a humorous and insightful take on many plagues from the past. In this book, I learned a ton, and Wright humanized historical figures in a way I really appreciated. More than anything, I felt hopeful and amazed a little bit by humanity. I even laughed a few times. Laughing? While reading a book about horrible diseases? It’s more likely than you think.

Generally humans don’t change much, but for every disease, there have been people fighting as hard as they can, many times with near-miraculous results, like vaccines and antibiotics.

If you decide to pick this book up, please be sure to read the epilogue, where Wright addresses the AIDS epidemic and it’s grievous mishandling by the US government in the 1980s. I can only imagine what she has had to think about COVID, and part of me would love to take a time machine to 100 years from now to read about this time through the same lens we are able to view smallpox and the Spanish Flu now.