Weaving together evolutionary microbiology, economics, military strategy, ecology, and ancient and modern medicine, author Rosen tells of history's first pandemic--a plague seven centuries before the Black Death that killed tens of millions, devastated the empires of Persia and Rome, left victims from Ireland to Iraq, and opened the way for the armies of Islam. Emperor Justinian had reunified Rome's fractured empire by defeating the Goths and Vandals...

"This book delves into several illnesses that have infected humans and affected civilizations. Each chapter explores the history of a specific disease, detailing the symptoms, cures, and medical breakthroughs that it spawned"--

Much of what we know about the greatest medical disaster ever, the Black Plague of the fourteenth century, is wrong. The details of the Plague etched in the minds of terrified schoolchildren ; the hideous black welts, the high fever, and the final, awful end by respiratory failure ; are more or less accurate. But what the Plague really was, and how it made history, remain shrouded in a haze of myths. Norman Cantor, the premier historian of the Middle...