Melvin Santer

Confronting Contagion is a book about one particular strand of human thinking about disease. It follows the rise, in the West, of the idea that (some) diseases are caused by tiny biological agents that penetrate the bodies of living things. Beginning with the Iliad, the Bible, and the Torah, it traces that idea through the writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans, Medieval “natural philosophers” and Renaissance-era scientists, before arriving at the mid-seventeenth century, when the newly invented microscope revealed a living world too small for the unaided eye to see. That much of the story—the transformation of “tiny particles” from speculation into observed reality—occupies the first half of the book. The second half traces the working-out, since 1700 or so, of the idea that some of those tiny particles are organisms capable of making living things (plants, animals, us) sick. The midpoint of the book thus sees a marked shift in tone: from the broad, abstract, and conceptual to the narrow, detailed, and practical.

The shift serves author Melvin Santer, an emeritus professor of biology at a respected liberal arts college, well. The first half of the book covers its chosen ground competently and comprehensively. His outlines of key figures and their ideas are crisp and concise, if occasionally repetitive, and his connection of the intellectual dots thus laid out is self-assured and convincing, but they are the work of an intelligent and well-prepared outsider. The second half of the book, by contrast, is the work of an expert writing about a subject that—having spent his professional life immersed in it—he knows intimately and understands intuitively.

Confronting Contagion is, however, a limited work. It is concerned with one specific idea. It is not, except incidentally, a history of attempts to cure disease, nor is it an examination of how disease (as a concept) has been defined. Folk medicine, and other beliefs about disease not rooted in the writings of contemporary theorists, is all but absent. Diseases that are inherited (hemophilia), non-infectious (cancer), or caused by non-biological agents (silicosis) are excluded by definition. Santer steers well clear both of the philosophical issues involved in defining “disease,” and of the socio-cultural ramifications of applying the label to (say) alcoholism or removing it from (say) homosexuality. Even without considering the book’s tight focus on the West, Confronting Contagion is not the broad history of “Our Evolving Understanding of Disease” that the cover implies.

It is also an extremely rough book. Not every history of science written for general audiences needs to have the polished, reads-like-a-novel narrative style of (say) Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map (2006). The prose in Confronting Contagion, however, is artless to the point of ugliness. Its basic prose style suggests equal measures of class notes (the book began as a series of lectures) and block quotations from sources, stirred lightly, and poured the onto the page with no attempt to blend the two together or impose a sense of narrative flow.

Virtually every sentence is understandable, and the paragraphs follow one another in logical order, but there is no sense of proportion, pacing, or shape. There are abundant errors that judicious copyediting should have caught, a dearth of footnotes, and a list of “Selected Readings” so sloppily formatted that it needs to be deciphered rather than read. My review copy may have been an uncorrected proof, but everything about its binding and presentation suggests otherwise. If so, Oxford University Press has done readers a great disservice.… (más)