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R. S. Bray
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Armies of Pestilence (The Impact of Disease on History) Paperback – January 1, 2000

by R.S. Bray (Author)
4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 18 ratings
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The Impact of Disease on History is explained in intriguing detail
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  1. Print length
    258 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Barnes and Nobel
  4. Publication date
    January 1, 2000
  5. ISBN-10
    0760719152
  6. ISBN-13
    978-0760719152
  7. See all details
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Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Barnes and Nobel (January 1, 2000)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 258 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0760719152
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0760719152
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.4 ounces
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 18 ratings

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R. S. Bray

R. S. Bray

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Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5 stars
4.3 out of 5
18 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Prof. James T. Griffith
5.0 out of 5 stars Armies of Pestilence
Reviewed in the United States on August 11, 2012
Verified Purchase
Authoritative, comprehensive, well written. Scientist author tells great story, all-in-all a winner. As a microbiologist myself, I might be biased, but these matters are not totally past us and this book is a great way to be informed. Both the history and science are accurate and delightful.
3 people found this helpful
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Amy R
5.0 out of 5 stars Such a good read!
Reviewed in the United States on March 22, 2015
Verified Purchase
Such a good read!! But it is thick with tiny print. The information is dense and amazing. The narrator is wry, dry, and incredibly witty to the educated reader. So informative and fun.
2 people found this helpful
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Jogger
3.0 out of 5 stars Very Informative, but Poorly Organized
Reviewed in the United States on June 9, 2019
Armies of Pestilence contains a tremendous amount of information, but is so poorly written, it’s difficult to absorb or find the information. The author desperately needs to add a summary for each chapter, and maybe a chart showing the salient points of the different diseases.

I suspect the book is too technical for the medical layman, yet not specific enough for the medical professional, and is certainly not geared towards the history student. The purpose seems to be to reference every respectable work completed on epidemics and pandemics. Bray’s basic approach is to research hundreds of other authors’ works, and compare and contrast them, and to show when and how disease has impacted history. He shows well the controversy of determining the actual disease of some ancient epidemic, and how different researchers come to different conclusions. Here’s a profound observation. “Health care in the affluent West has now shifted from the infectious diseases of the nineteenth and preceding centuries and the children’s diseases of the early twentieth century to the problems of old age, cancer, heart disease, congenital abnormalities, and physical defects.”

For each disease he measures the impact on history.

Only malaria is as old as man and thus dates from before the agricultural revolution. All the rest of our diseases are post agricultural revolution. As hunter gatherers we only had to contend with malaria. All of the diseases discussed in the book started as zoonotic – we got them from another animal.

Here is the list of chapters:
Chapter 1 Early Civilizations
Chapter 2 Rome
In this chapter Bray also introduces a concept he continues for the remainder of the book, dispelling the belief that famine causes pestilence. Modern germ and contagion theory dismisses this out of hand, and Bray takes the nutritionists to task, showing there is no causality between malnutrition and contagion. Rather, he thinks that pestilence could cause famine because as populations dwindle there are less people to work the fields and bring in the crops. Furthermore, he writes, “hunger drives people together into masses ideal for the spread of infectious disease.”

Chapter 3-5 Plague -- Justinian’s’ Plague
Plague is a bacterial disease caused by Yersinia Pestis, usually transmitted by flea. It has three main forms:
1. Bubonic
2. Pneumonic
3. Septicaemic
They are not mutually exclusive.
[We know Ebola, Marburg, AIDS (HIV), likely Yellow Fever, all came from the African rainforest. Y. pestis may have also originated there, worked its way north, through Ethiopia, through Egypt, to infect the Mediterranean in the 6th century, then lingered in a backwater in central Asia for seven centuries to reemerge in a more deadly strain in the 14th century. We are out of Africa. Are the diseases which still haunt us also out of Africa?]

Chapter 6-8 Plague -- The Black Death
Chapter 9 Plague -- The Bombay Plague
Chapter 10-12 Malaria Four types of malaria.
Chapter 13 Yellow Fever
Chapter 14-16 Smallpox
Chapter 17-18 Typhus
Chapter 19-22 Cholera Includes typhoid and dysentery
Chapter 23-24 Influenza

Conclusion
His primary conclusion is that epidemic does not effect a culture on the rise for other reasons, but does effect one on the decline.
Famine does not cause disease, other than indirectly by crowding people together. Disease can cause famine by destroying the economy. Moral weakness or sin do not bring about disease, but poor hygiene can spread disease.
Another conclusion is historians must include prevalent diseases and epidemics in their analysis of any culture.
The Agrarian Revolution brought about all these diseases except malaria. It wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution that mankind had any real chance of combating them.
Plague, cholera, AIDS, malaria, influenza, yellow fever, typhus, typhoid, and dysentery are all still with us.

Bray doesn’t discuss AIDS/ HIV except in passing, tuberculosis, Legionnaire’s Disease only in passing, Ebola, Marburg, or Hanta.
3 people found this helpful
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Mondo
4.0 out of 5 stars Devastation of Armies
Reviewed in the United States on August 13, 2012
I'm used to reading books on reasonably technical subjects that are neither exciting page turners nor literary masterpieces. I therefore tend to rate such books on informational content. This book is full of content. It deals with a number of easily identified and devastating disease as well as some ancient, apparently infectious epidemics, that have somehow disappeared from history. An interaction of disease organism and immunity may have caused a change in symptoms to the extent that we can no longer match the present disease with the ancient disease. On the other hand, certain disease organisms may have become non-pathogenic over the centuries or, because of lethal efficiency, may have disappeared from the human species.

This last should be emphasized. A pathogenic organism can only remain infectious to the extent that it maintains a continuous string of infections. If an organism is too lethal, it kills off its last victim and kills itself off in the process. If rabies, for example, were maintained ONLY in the human species, it would have long ceased to exist. It is not only uniformly fatal but kills quickly. There are virtually no descriptions of human-to-human transmission. It is entirely possible that some past infectious diseases blew up and produced sudden, extremely efficient and lethal diseases breaking the infectious string.

No matter. Most of the diseases described--Bubonic Plague, Malaria, Yellow Fever, Small Pox, Typhus etc--have established a balance of survival/lethality with the human species and therefore [with the exception of Small Pox] continue to be a problem. Yes, some have changed. Yersenia pests doesn't seem to have quite the same potential for major epidemic spread that it once had. Yes, occasional lethal cases but, even considering modern therapies, epidemic pockets--even in North America--should still occur. They don't seem to do so, however. Is this due to 'herd immunity' developed via natural selection during the Middle Ages or are there many strains of the bacterium most of which don't have a major epidemic potential?
4 people found this helpful
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Kindle Customer
2.0 out of 5 stars A bit erratic
Reviewed in the United States on April 16, 2020
There was a lot of research that went into this book, but the flaws were too much. Biased at times, giving judgemental opinions instead of non-biased arguments. Quite a number of typos, an editor really could have helped. Also a bit choppy and erratic at points. Not a bad book, but could use an editor.
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Severin Olson
4.0 out of 5 stars OUR PARASITICAL COMPANIONS
Reviewed in the United States on March 1, 2008
Once again an author has told us the story of how our ancestors lived with epidemic disease, our 'parasitical companions'. One can only be amazed at how many existed, and thankful to be alive during calmer microbial times. Any account can only include a sample of these diseases, and this one covers cholera, smallpox, plague, influenza, malaria, yellow fever and typhus. The reader will likely find this to be plenty enough.

Armies of Pestilence is part of a family of books on epidemic disease. It is similar to Plagues and Peoples by McNeil, and especially to Cartwright's book on disease and history. Anyone intersted in how the world has been impacted by these outbreaks should find this work informative and enjoyable.
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Rosanna
3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting but very poorly written
Reviewed in the United States on March 17, 2010
While the book was informative, it was full of grammatical errors, spelling errors, punctuation errors, and paragraphs that were so poorly written they didn't make sense. There were so many mistakes, it was distracting. Many times there were five and six errors on one page.
3 people found this helpful
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