Disease tells the story of the impact of disease on human history by means of fifty lively and readable essays on fifty key diseases, plagues and epidemics, from heart disease to haemophilia, from leprosy to lupus, from scrofula to syphilis, from tuberculosis to typhoid, and from the Black Death of the 14th century to the AIDS epidemic of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. These essays function both as self-contained mini-histories of individual diseases and as part of a larger narrative chronicling the history of medicine.
