“Biology and ecology, and the play between them, are the ultimate shapers of human destiny,” writes British historian Simon Schama in the first paragraph of Foreign Bodies. It’s a point that’s been lost in the hubris of human development — the Ages of Reason, Discovery and, now, Information, bracketing the most audaciously disruptive, the Industrial Revolution. We think we rule the world, but we are at the mercy of things we cannot — or choose not to — see.
Where Schama goes with this — sometimes implied in measured tones, sometimes vehemently — is that Covid has been an illustration of our continuing stupidity.
He begins by slating our modern urban environments’ betrayal of the natural world. Having driven the climate crisis, deforestation and industrial-scale mono-agriculture, polluted the earth with poisons and plastics and forced animal populations into displacement, we shouldn’t be surprised that we have to live with baboons or bears scratching in our bins, tigers snatching people in villages and, worse, “disruption-born contagions happening in domestic as well as exotic places”.
The book’s title is smart, referencing the infinitesimal microbes that plague us while also alluding to the age-old xenophobic attitudes to people of other colours or faiths, and immigrants — because some other group always takes the blame.
To an extent this picks up threads from Schama’s two-volume magnum opus, The Story of the Jews. But in an online exchange he corrects me, pointing out that many of his earlier works touch upon Foreign Bodies’ themes. “Landscape and Memory [1995] is probably the most important and ambitious of my books, the one I always felt I was born to write, about the relationship between the natural and the human worlds,” he says. “And Foreign Bodies is another facet of a long preoccupation with the dialogue and conflict between ideas of homelands and foreignness in Dutch, American and British histories. So the thread runs through many of my books.”
It also proves Schama’s incredible versatility; his 19 previous works include histories of art and culture, a historical novel, an all-encompassing history of Britain, and various lenses on the rise of the colonial powers.
Indeed, the colonial desire for trade and territorial domination came at a cost. For example, the Silk Road and Spice Route meant the import of smallpox, “unknown in the west and Asia Minor” but virulent in China in the 17th and 18th centuries.
But increasingly globalised connections spurred urgent efforts to understand the diseases and act in concert — somehow — for the common good.
Foreign Bodies is [a] facet of a long preoccupation with the dialogue and conflict between ideas of homelands and foreignness
— Simon Schama
Lateral thinkers
I was amazed to read that the concept of vaccinations goes back long before any understanding of pathogens. Early 18th-century West European travellers and diplomats, for example, noticed how the dreaded pox was combated by supposedly backward communities in the Middle East.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu took note. Her husband was England’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, and she preferred to believe in what she could see was working in Constantinople rather than the conventional English “wisdom” of balms, bleeding, the intake of bizarre fluids and acceptance of illness as God’s will. In front of a few selected witnesses she inoculated her very young children in 1721 and became an activist, spreading the practice in her home country and onwards into Western Europe.
French clinician and epidemiologist Adrien Proust constantly attended medical conferences around the world in the second half of the 19th century, lobbying for improved hygiene. We can think of him as the spiritual founder of the World Health Organisation; his activism also explains the hypochondria of his literary genius son, Marcel.
Roughly simultaneous to Proust, but more overtly in the trenches, Ukraine-born French bacteriologist Waldemar Haffkine developed not one but two vaccines in the late 1800s. Severe cholera outbreaks in India were his testing ground for the first. After two to three years of logistical problems his anticholera vaccine was proved effective. Ignoring the British colonial government’s ineffective health measures, thousands of people queued for days in the slums of Kolkata to receive his vaccine.
Haffkine also responded to the plague pandemic of 1894. The “death of rats” started in China, jumped quickly to Hong Kong, then spread across the British Empire and beyond. India was again hugely affected, and this time Haffkine worked tirelessly from a base in Mumbai. It’s impossible to estimate the number of lives his vaccines saved, but the figure would be in the millions.
Another hero was American physician and virologist Jonas Salk, who developed the first polio vaccine in the early 1950s. Up to that point polio was a crippling and often deadly disease, especially for children. Like Lady Montagu, he inoculated his own children — years before the vaccine was formally approved in 1955.
The human condition is one simultaneously of infinite ingenuity and primitive susceptibility to fear
— Simon Schama
Knowledge is power
Throughout history and in any field of human endeavour, greater knowledge leads to improved outcomes. I ask Schama why, three centuries after the Age of Enlightenment, so many millions find this difficult to accept in relation to the sciences, notably medical discoveries and vaccines in particular. (The March 2023 Pew Research Centre survey shows that 21% of Americans reject vaccines, and a third are ambivalent.)
“The human condition is simultaneously one of infinite ingenuity and primitive susceptibility to fear,” he responds.
Political populism plays a role too. “Truly educated people can’t possibly believe that vaccines are toxic. Yet [US Democratic Party 2024 presidential nominee] Robert F Kennedy Jr is running on that. It’s moot whether people can be persuasively debated with.”
He points to the internet, which contributes to the germination and spread of conspiracy theories, paranoia, outlandish views as “facts” and support for charlatans. There is a YouTube video of him discussing this in more detail with Dutch media forum De Balie: “It’s fucking dangerous,” he says. “And you may quote me.”
My question, and Schama’s response, is at the heart of one of the issues examined in Foreign Bodies: culture and identity as a factor in countries’ overall health. Wealth doesn’t necessarily translate into improved health, as we see in the US; the world’s wealthiest country has had more than 1.1-million Covid deaths, the highest of any nation.
Schama is unafraid to speak his mind on other aspects of American psychology. “Democracy often brings fascists to power, [as] it did in the 1930s,” he said in a BBC interview immediately after Donald Trump was elected US president in 2016.
As forthrightly, he tells in Foreign Bodies of a less near-term but more existential threat: transmission of zoonotic, animal-to-human diseases that will be untreatable with antibiotics. “This bleak syndrome is no longer a possibility but a certainty,” he writes.
Wilful ignorance
So many people’s rejection of facts, or apathy in understanding mistakes of the past, prompts a different question. Do novels — the emotive power of storied imagination — succeed better in moving people to change?
“I’m not sure [that’s the case],” he replies. “Look at the millions of copies sold of [Israeli historian and futurist] Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, for instance. Nonfiction just needs to be grippingly written.”
By Schama’s own measure, I’d give Foreign Bodies seven out of 10. His knowledge and research, erudition and flex between fact and provocative viewpoint make for a generally interesting and sometimes fascinating read. But unless the reader has an innate interest in medical discoveries, it isn’t riveting.
Maybe that’s his real point: Covid should have shaken us to greater awareness of, and involvement in, human health issues tied to the state of our world. So why are we still so fractious or entirely disengaged?
* Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations by Simon Schama (Simon & Schuster, 2023)
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