80 books like Epidemics

By Joshua Loomis,

Here are 80 books that Epidemics fans have personally recommended if you like Epidemics. Shepherd is a community of 11,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82

Rae Spencer Author Of Alchemy

From my list on could have been dull but are actually poetry.

Why am I passionate about this?

In my everyday world of responsibilities, I’m a writer, retired veterinarian, and freelance English editor for academic writing. But in my inner world of curiosity and obsessions, I’m forever a child with a profound longing to understand what the world is and how it works. Always searching on behalf of this forever child, I’ve read many a dull book about science, history, and writing. Despite having fascinating content, authors often flatten these subjects into featureless recitations. Happily, I’ve also found authors who express enthusiasm, expertise, or concern for their topic in prose that is as interesting in voice as it is in content.

Rae's book list on could have been dull but are actually poetry

Rae Spencer Why did Rae love this book?

I can’t describe this book better than the author describes it: “While the American Revolution may have defined the era for history, epidemic smallpox nevertheless defined it for many of the Americans who lived and died in that time” (p. 273, 275).

Most of what I thought I knew about the Revolutionary War period ended up adjusted after reading this book. In straightforward prose that still manages to be poetic, Pox Americana forced me to examine both my educational history and the ways I had ingested and processed my education. 

By Elizabeth A. Fenn,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Pox Americana as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The astonishing, hitherto unknown truths about a disease that transformed the United States at its birth

A horrifying epidemic of smallpox was sweeping across the Americas when the American Revolution began, and yet we know almost nothing about it. Elizabeth A. Fenn is the first historian to reveal how deeply variola affected the outcome of the war in every colony and the lives of everyone in North America.

By 1776, when military action and political ferment increased the movement of people and microbes, the epidemic worsened. Fenn's remarkable research shows us how smallpox devastated the American troops at Québec and…


Book cover of Plagues and Peoples

Gary Clayton Anderson Author Of Massacre in Minnesota: The Dakota War of 1862, the Most Violent Ethnic Conflict in American History

From my list on stories so engaging you loose track of time.

Why am I passionate about this?

I grew up on the Northern Plains, visiting Indian Reservations where my mother was a social worker. The poverty, hopelessness, and general lack of medical care and schooling made a profound impact on me. It led me to Graduate School and the study of American Indians. Of my twelve books, two have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, and several others have won minor prizes. As a historian, I realize that we can turn things around. We can strive to better understand the past, and prepare our children and grandchildren for the future. But this will never happen by banning books. We must face the brave, new world that is upon us.

Gary's book list on stories so engaging you loose track of time

Gary Clayton Anderson Why did Gary love this book?

As a historian, some books just keep coming back to you. McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples is just such a book. 

He is really the first historian to outline the dramatic impact that infectious diseases have had on human history. He outlines the spread of smallpox, diphtheria, Yellow Fever, Malaria, the Plague, and many others, as they originate mostly in Africa and come into the Mediterranean Ocean, to produce cycles of death. 

But the people who lived on the edge of that ocean soon came to develop antibodies, and ultimately, master the impact of such terrible diseases.  

Unfortunately, those diseases were soon transferred to the Americas, where perhaps a hundred million American Indians died from them. They had no immunities!

Had such a calamity not occurred, the two western hemispheric continents might easily be dominated by Natives, who spoke a different language and prayed to a different God.

By William H. McNeill,

Why should I read it?

4 authors picked Plagues and Peoples as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Upon its original publication, Plagues and Peoples was an immediate critical and popular success, offering a radically new interpretation of world history as seen through the extraordinary impact--political, demographic, ecological, and psychological--of disease on cultures. From the conquest of Mexico by smallpox as much as by the Spanish, to the bubonic plague in China, to the typhoid epidemic in Europe, the history of disease is the history of humankind. With the identification of AIDS in the early 1980s, another chapter has been added to this chronicle of events, which William McNeill explores in his new introduction to this updated editon.…


Book cover of Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History

Carol R. Byerly Author Of Fever of War: The Influenza Epidemic in the U.S. Army During World War I

From my list on how diseases shape society.

Why am I passionate about this?

Carol R. Byerly is a historian specializing in the history of military medicine. She has taught American history and the history of medicine history at the University of Colorado, Boulder, was a contract historian for the U.S. Army Office of the Surgeon General, Office of History, and has also worked for the U.S. Congress and the American Red Cross. Byerly’s publications include Fever of War: The Influenza Epidemic in the U.S. Army during World War I and Good Tuberculosis Men: The Army Medical Department’s Struggle with Tuberculosis. She is currently working on a biography of Army medical officer William C. Gorgas, (1854-1920), whose public health measures, including clearing yellow fever from Panama, enabled the United States to construct the canal across the Isthmus.

Carol's book list on how diseases shape society

Carol R. Byerly Why did Carol love this book?

One of the editors of this volume is a pioneer in the history of medicine, Charles Rosenberg, who theorizes that diseases are powerful “actors” in society. The book uses fourteen case studies to demonstrate how diseases can “frame” people in various ways, defining their lives with pain, disability, or stigma. Diseases also give rise to various institutions such as sanitariums, research laboratories and stimulate the development of medical specialties. As our scientific and social understanding of individual diseases changes over time, how a society responds to or “frames” those diseases changes as well.

By Charles E. Rosenberg, Janet Golden (editor),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Framing Disease as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In some ways disease does not exist until we have agreed that it does, by perceiving, naming, and responding to it, "" writes Charles E. Rosenberg in his introduction to this stimulating set of essays. Disease is both a biological event and a social phenomenon. Patient, doctor, family, and social institutions-including employers, government, and insurance companies-all find ways to frame the biological event in terms that make sense to them and serve their own ends. Many diseases discussed here-endstage renal disease, rheumatic fever, parasitic infectious diseases, coronary thrombosis-came to be defined, redefined, and renamed over the course of several centuries.…


Book cover of Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914

Carol R. Byerly Author Of Fever of War: The Influenza Epidemic in the U.S. Army During World War I

From my list on how diseases shape society.

Why am I passionate about this?

Carol R. Byerly is a historian specializing in the history of military medicine. She has taught American history and the history of medicine history at the University of Colorado, Boulder, was a contract historian for the U.S. Army Office of the Surgeon General, Office of History, and has also worked for the U.S. Congress and the American Red Cross. Byerly’s publications include Fever of War: The Influenza Epidemic in the U.S. Army during World War I and Good Tuberculosis Men: The Army Medical Department’s Struggle with Tuberculosis. She is currently working on a biography of Army medical officer William C. Gorgas, (1854-1920), whose public health measures, including clearing yellow fever from Panama, enabled the United States to construct the canal across the Isthmus.

Carol's book list on how diseases shape society

Carol R. Byerly Why did Carol love this book?

McNeill, William McNeill’s son, examines the intersection of disease, ecology, race, and international politics to show how infectious disease shaped the fortunes of colonial empires in the Caribbean. In the wake of the encounter between Europeans and the New World which destroyed up to 90 percent of the Amerindian population, European empires restructured the region into a colonial economy of sugar and slavery. Mosquitos bearing malaria and yellow fever flourished in this environment and McNeill shows how anyone seeking power in the region had to reckon with both them and disease.

By J.R. McNeill,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Mosquito Empires as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This book explores the links among ecology, disease, and international politics in the context of the Greater Caribbean - the landscapes lying between Surinam and the Chesapeake - in the seventeenth through early twentieth centuries. Ecological changes made these landscapes especially suitable for the vector mosquitoes of yellow fever and malaria, and these diseases wrought systematic havoc among armies and would-be settlers. Because yellow fever confers immunity on survivors of the disease, and because malaria confers resistance, these diseases played partisan roles in the struggles for empire and revolution, attacking some populations more severely than others. In particular, yellow fever…


Book cover of Get Well Soon: History's Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them

Brian Elliott Author Of White Coat Ways: A History of Medical Traditions and Their Battle with Progress

From my list on medical history that changes medical perspective.

Why am I passionate about this?

As a physician, medicine is my job. But along the way, I wondered how medicine got to where it is now–like really wondered. I wondered to the point that I was reading the original treatises written by 18th-century physicians. I started publishing research on medical history and giving presentations at medical conferences. I’d like to think this helps me be a better doctor by broadening my perspective on the healthcare industry. But at the very least, I’ve found these books enjoyable and compelling. I hope you enjoy them, too!

Brian's book list on medical history that changes medical perspective

Brian Elliott Why did Brian love this book?

I never thought I’d describe a book about plagues as amusing and laughable, but Jennifer Wright found a way to write one. Thanks to this book, I now have a favorite plague–which is obviously the dancing plague.

I’ve re-read this book multiple times because it’s such lighthearted and fluent storytelling. I read it both before and after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

At first, the discussion regarding plagues and people’s reactions to them seemed prophetic. But really, this book made me realize how much history repeats itself, even when it comes to infectious diseases.

By Jennifer Wright,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Get Well Soon as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In 1518, in a small town in France, Frau Troffea began dancing and didn't stop. She danced herself to her death six days later, and soon thirty-four more villagers joined her. Then more. In a month more than 400 people had died from the mysterious dancing plague. In late-nineteenth-century England an eccentric gentleman founded the No Nose Club in his gracious townhome--a social club for those who had lost their noses, and other body parts, to the plague of syphilis for which there was then no cure. And in turn-of-the-century New York, an Irish cook caused two lethal outbreaks of…


Book cover of The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris

Nancy Tomes Author Of The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life

From my list on get you ready for the next big pandemic.

Why am I passionate about this?

My passion for this topic dates back to my childhood and being impressed by the scary diseases and unhygienic toilets that were part of my family lore. I grew up to be a historian of medicine, which allowed me to indulge my interest in deadly diseases—at a safe historical distance! That curiosity led me to write the Gospel of Germs, a history of popular understandings of the germ theory of disease. Post-COVID, I am thinking about how to get ready for the next big pandemic that climate change and globalization will likely throw at us: will it be bird flu, dengue, mpox, or some new COVID variant?

Nancy's book list on get you ready for the next big pandemic

Nancy Tomes Why did Nancy love this book?

I love this book because Mark Honigsbaum puts COVID in a sweeping historical perspective. He writes insightfully about well-known epidemics of the past century (the 1918-1919 influenza, HIV- AIDs, Ebola) and lesser-known outbreaks of diseases (like bubonic plague and parrot fever).

Honigsbaum combines good science writing with profiles of interesting characters, including microbial, animal, and human actors. Be sure to buy the new version that he revised to include COVID-19. 

By Mark Honigsbaum,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Pandemic Century as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

How can we understand the COVID-19 pandemic?

Ever since the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, scientists have dreamed of preventing such catastrophic outbreaks of infectious disease. Yet, despite a century of medical progress, viral and bacterial disasters continue to take us by surprise, inciting panic and dominating news cycles. In The Pandemic Century, a lively account of scares both infamous and less known, medical historian Mark Honigsbaum combines reportage with the history of science and medical sociology to artfully reconstruct epidemiological mysteries and the ecology of infectious diseases. We meet dedicated disease detectives, obstructive or incompetent public health officials and brilliant…


Book cover of History Smashers: Plagues and Pandemics

Caroline Fernandez Author Of Plague Thieves

From my list on books for kids about the plague.

Why am I passionate about this?

I find Plagues to be fascinating, especially having lived through COVID-19 (with masks and distancing and fear of catching an unknown sickness!). The Plague of London in 1665 especially interests me because it brings in the well-known character of The Plague Doctor. This iconic character is feared and admired (and still a very popular Halloween costume). I have done extensive research on the 1665 Plague in terms of how it affected food insecurity, homelessness, fear, trade routes, employment, and the different classes of a community.

Caroline's book list on books for kids about the plague

Caroline Fernandez Why did Caroline love this book?

I loved this middle-grade book about plagues! It was a page-turner with interesting facts, fun stories, and great illustrations. I also found the easy-to-read history gripping. This book would be a great addition to home and school libraries. It is not just a reference book; it is a great MG read!

By Kate Messner, Falynn Koch (illustrator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked History Smashers as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it. This book is for kids age 8, 9, 10, and 11.

What is this book about?

Myths! Lies! Secrets! Uncover the hidden truth about history's pandemics, from the Black Death to COVID-19. Perfect for fans of I Survived! and Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales.

During the Black Death in the 14th century, plague doctors wore creepy beaked masks filled with herbs. RIGHT?
WRONG! Those masks were from a plague outbreak centuries later--and most doctors never wore anything like that at all!

With a mix of sidebars, illustrations, photos, and graphic panels, acclaimed author Kate Messner delivers the whole truth about diseases like the bubonic plague, cholera, smallpox, tuberculosis, polio, influenza, and COVID-19.

Discover the nonfiction series that…


Book cover of Natural History of Infectious Disease

John M. Barry Author Of The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History

From my list on disease and society.

Why am I passionate about this?

John M. Barry was the only non-scientist ever to give the National Academies of Sciences Abel Wolman Distinguished Lecture, and he advised the Bush and Obama White Houses on pandemic preparedness and response. He is an award-winning and #1 New York Times best-selling author whose books have also involved him in policy making. The National Academies of Science named The Great Influenza the year’s outstanding book on science or medicine.

John's book list on disease and society

John M. Barry Why did John love this book?

This provides the reader with the background to understand what happens when a pathogen invades both an individual and a society. It’s an absolutely brilliant book by a Nobel laureate scientist, one of my all-time favorites on any subject.

By David O. White, Macfarlane Burnet,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Natural History of Infectious Disease as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Provides a biological inquiry into the causes and spread of infectious disease and its impact on human survival


Book cover of The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance

Steffanie Strathdee Author Of The Perfect Predator: A Scientist's Race to Save Her Husband from a Deadly Superbug: A Memoir

From my list on for armchair infectious disease epidemiologists.

Why am I passionate about this?

As an infectious disease epidemiologist, my personal and professional lives collided when my husband Tom acquired a superbug that was resistant to all antibiotics while we were traveling on vacation. The story of how a global village of researchers and medical professionals helped me save his life with a 100-year-old forgotten cure is the subject of our first book, The Perfect Predator: A Scientist's Race to Save Her Husband From a Deadly Superbug. A large part of my day job now is as a phage wrangler, helping other people who are battling superbug infections at IPATH, the first phage therapy center in North America.

Steffanie's book list on for armchair infectious disease epidemiologists

Steffanie Strathdee Why did Steffanie love this book?

Notable for its prescience and timelessness, this award-winning book by Pulitzer and Peabody winner Laurie Garrett is a must-read for infectious disease aficionados. This book addresses the macro-level factors that drive the emergence of epidemics, such as the over-use of antibiotics in agriculture and climate change. It is a primer on why we need a global health perspective to address pandemics, so it's no wonder that it was re-printed when the COVID-19 pandemic began.

By Laurie Garrett,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Coming Plague as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

After four decades of assuming that the conquest of infectious diseases was imminent, people on all continents now find themselves besieged. The water we drink is improperly purified, the air we breathe potentially deadly, and the food we eat possibly poisonous. What went wrong? This book follows the doctors and scientists in their 50 year battle with the microbes, ranging from the savannas of Bolivia to the rain forests of Zaire. Jet travel, the sexual revolution and over-population - all favour the survival of new and old bugs, among them, malaria, Ebola, cholera and tuberculosis, and viruses that kill in…


Book cover of No Time to Lose: A Life in Pursuit of Deadly Viruses

David Quammen Author Of Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus

From my list on rigorously scientific scary viruses.

Why am I passionate about this?

As a journalist and an author, I’ve been covering the subject of scary viruses for twenty years—ever since I walked through Ebola habitat in a forest in northeastern Gabon, on assignment for National Geographic. I’ve interviewed many of the eminent experts—from Peter Piot to Marion Koopmans to Tony Fauci—and have spent field time with some of the intrepid younger disease ecologists who look for viruses in bat guano in Chinese caves and in gorilla blood in Central African forests. My book Spillover, published in 2012, drew much of that research together in describing the history and evolutionary ecology of animal infections that spill into humans.

David's book list on rigorously scientific scary viruses

David Quammen Why did David love this book?

Peter Piot was a young microbiologist at a lab in Belgium, in 1976, when he was assigned to analyze specimens in a thermos bottle shipped up from Zaire, where villagers were dying of a horrific and unknown disease. The thermos contained a virus that came to be known as Ebola. This was the event, as his book vividly recounts, that led Piot to a long and distinguished career in infectious viral diseases, from Ebola to AIDS and beyond.

By Peter Piot,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked No Time to Lose as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

When Peter Piot was in medical school, a professor warned, "There's no future in infectious diseases. They've all been solved." Fortunately, Piot ignored him, and the result has been an exceptional, adventure-filled career. In the 1970s, as a young man, Piot was sent to Central Africa as part of a team tasked with identifying a grisly new virus. Crossing into the quarantine zone on the most dangerous missions, he studied local customs to determine how this disease-the Ebola virus-was spreading. Later, Piot found himself in the field again when another mysterious epidemic broke out: AIDS. He traveled throughout Africa, leading…


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