Politics of a Plague | by Gordon A. Craig | The New York Review of Books

Richard Evans s new book, which concentrates on the cholera epidemic in Hamburg in 1892, is precisely the kind of study that Briggs had in mind. A brilliantly written work of great analytical penetration, which is based on very extensive reading, it is not a mere description of the Hamburg epidemic of 1892 (which, even with its 17,000 cases and 8,600 deaths and its mortality rate of 13.4 per thousand, was far less severe than the epidemics in Montreal in 1832 or in Hungary in 1873), but rather an investigation of why the harbor city on the Elbe, alone of the great European cities, suffered a major outbreak in that year. Evans finds the answer to that question in the peculiar combination of political, economic, social, and medical circumstances that prevailed in Hamburg at the time, which not only explained the failure to take preventive action before the crisis came but also determined the nature of the response to it and the corrective measures taken after it was over.

via www.nybooks.com