100 books like The Black Death

Edward III’s founding of the Order of the Garter was what inspired me to write my book, but I knew little about him.

This true medieval king’s fifty-year-long reign was marked by controversy from the start, but he was also a romantic, a warrior (he instigated the 100 Year War against the French), steered England through the horrific amount of death from the plague in 1348, and was the patriarch to The Black Prince and John of Gaunt, and The War of the Roses came after his reign.

I recommend this fascinating account of his life. 

Rees Davies was one of the first historians to seek to explore the histories of Britain and Ireland as both unique and intertwined narratives. Although this book focuses on the Welsh revolt of the early 15th century it shows the author’s formidable understanding of the relationship between England and Wales in the century after the Edwardian conquest. An object lesson in academic history written with the general reader in mind.

Often said to have been in decline in the later middle ages, this treatise, by a French knight, written for King John II’s Company of the Star, shows that chivalry, although under great pressure, remained a hugely powerful ethos which continued to shape aristocratic life in the fourteenth century. The work details the trials and travails of a life in arms and the ‘worth’ of various military enterprises. Rather poignantly, Charny died at the battle of Poitiers (1356) while bearing the Oriflamme, the French banner.

In the plague years of 14th century England, a young runaway priest, Nicholas Barber, hides himself by joining a troupe of traveling players and thereby finds himself a new role in a wider world. Nicholas’s story begins at an inflection point, when the residents in a particular town are more interested in an actual crime of murder than in seeing yet another iteration of the traditional religious Morality play. To captivate and keep their audience, the actors—with Nicholas now one of them—create a play of real life about the town’s murder. Their drama evolves in a series of performances as they discover more details of the mystery, at last leading them to its resolution. A fascinating interplay of history, mystery, theater, and human nature! I love this book.

This collection of previously published essays by Charles Rosenberg elaborates many of his ideas about how people make meaning out of epidemics, including his famous theory that epidemics are understood in a dramatic tripartite structure (see “What Is an Epidemic? AIDS in Historical Perspective”). Rosenberg shows not only how the history of medicine illuminates larger themes, but why it matters, both to those of us interested in history and those interested in medical science itself. 

This fantastic biography recounts one of the greatest rivalries in medical history during the race for the polio vaccine, which pitted Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin against each other.

Salk favored a killed-virus approach, which was easier but perhaps less protective and long lasting. Sabin preferred an attenuated-virus method that was more difficult to make but could be life-long and delivered orally rather than by serial injections.

Salk’s vaccine arrived first and saved thousands of lives, but Sabin still publicly criticized it, even in testimony to Congress. Sabin’s vaccine later became favored, but the debate about whose was superior persisted and continued long after each man’s death.

Carter’s superb narrative benefited from his weeks-long interviews with Salk, and interviews with other major figures in the effort to defeat polio.

The discovery of penicillin is one of humanity’s greatest stories of serendipity and Eric Lax’s retelling is excellent.

Though Alexander Fleming has received the lion’s share of the credit for this discovery, in truth, Howard Florey, Ernst Chain, and Norman Heatley were the ones who discovered and proved the penicillium mold’s true medical effectiveness as an antibiotic.

How this trio from Oxford made their breakthrough at the height of WWII and were robbed of the credit is a fabulous tale as spellbinding as any Hollywood movie.

This book is filled with fascinating facts about medieval medicine, surgery, humoural theory, disease, and diagnosis. But what is surprising is how many other aspects of the Middle Ages are covered through the theme of bodies.

We learn about strange creatures like blemmyae (who have no heads and faces in their chests) and cynocephali (dog-headed people), saints and relics, race relations and politics, manuscript manufacture, religion, literature, travel, eating habits, love, sexuality, and gender identity.

I love how the chapters are organized by body part, from head to feet, a clever approach I have never seen in a history book before. Hartnell demonstrates how the medieval past is "an uncanny place at once startlingly different from and strangely familiar to our own."

The discovery of insulin in early 1922 was a medical milestone that has since saved countless lives–my own included. Until this moment, a diagnosis of Type 1 Diabetes was a certain death sentence. But as diabetes clinician and historian of medicine, Chris Feudtner points out, the success of insulin has distorted historical accounts of diabetes by marginalising the experience of the patient in favour of narratives that focus on the development of medical technology to treat them. And Feudtner’s diagnosis is confined not just to diabetes but to the history of medicine in general. Following a personal epiphany that patients have an existence beyond X-rays and blood tests, Feudtner set out to address this problem by writing a history of diabetes as told from the perspective of patients. He does so magnificently and offers important insights about our relationship with technology that extend well beyond the treatment of diabetes.

Bliss’s classic book is the definitive account of the discovery of insulin by Canadians Frederick Banting, Charles Best, J.R.R. Macleod, and James Collip. I share this story in my book but Bliss delves far deeper into this incredible tale full of drama and human failings.

Bliss describes Banting as a failed surgeon who had a middle-of-the-night epiphany about how to isolate the unknown product of the pancreas’s mysterious islets of Langerhans cells. Eminent scientist Macleod gives Banting a chance and some lab space, but in the end, Banting accuses Macleod of stealing credit for this discovery that turns diabetes from a death sentence into a chronic, manageable illness.

Banting loathes Macleod so much that he almost refuses his Nobel Prize because he is so angry that Macleod will also get one!