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Suzanne Austin Alchon. A Pest in the Land: New World Epidemics in a Global Perspective. Dialogos. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003. ix + 214 pp. 111. $45.00 (cloth, 0-8263-2870-9), $22.95 (paperbound, 0-8263-2871-7).
This text, designed for the classroom, focuses on the issue of the apparent collapse of native American populations following Old World contact in the late fifteenth century. Suzanne Austin AIchon rightly argues that the lack of success of Amerindians in the confrontation with outsiders was not due to a single cause, but was based on a combination of factors. War, exploitation, slavery, migration, and disease all had a negative impact on New World peoples. While some recent scholars have stressed the role of epidemic disease in the process, here the author attempts a more balanced approach.
The first chapter, on the impact of disease in the Old World before 1500, sets the stage as Alchon points out that while epidemics came regularly, killer pandemics appeared less frequently, and the response to the threat of disease was similar across cultures. Her diagnosis of smallpox as the killer epidemic that afflicted the Athenians during the Peloponnesian Wars may be too quick, given the long debate among historians of medicine on the correct identification of this "plague" that...