Cholera: The Biography (Biographies of Disease) by Christopher Hamlin

"Lively and readable.

"Hamlin's book does an excellent job of treating a complex subject with scientific rigor while also being completely accessible to a lay audience. Highly recommend this book to anyone interested in learning more about the origins and history of a "disease" about which the more we know the less certain we become."--Emerging Infectious Diseases

"Hamlin's Cholera deftly demonstrates that people's response to cholera transformed notions of class and race, the role of governments, and the course of modern biomedicine, especially with the advent of cheap pharmaceuticals to which all people and all nations could have access regardless of economic and political troubles. [Cholera] contributes to our understanding of the ways in which disease and its treatment are linked fundamentally to social and scientific history, and the ways in which biographies can shed new light on some very old diseases." --

Listed in Science Book News

"This is dark stuff, but fascinating stuff. These four biographies of diseases go far beyond questions of biology or medical practice; they talk politics, sex and class, faith, how to plan a healthy world and how to be a proper woman or a proper man. Strangest and most fascinating of all is the way you keep glimpsing whole societies reflected in the surgery, from the drinking water to the high philosophy."--Scotsman.com