n is natural history.” Foreign Bodies is the end,” writes Simon Schama at the beginning of his extraordinary book on pandemics old and new, “all history ostensibly an account of the bacteriologists and epidemiologists who studied the natural history of infectious diseases from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries, developing vaccines and saving millions from smallpox, cholera and the plague. But as its subtitle, Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations,
