Sandra Hempel - The Atlas of Disease: Mapping Deadly Epidemics and Contagion from the Plague to the Zika Virus

John Snows iconic map of the 1854 cholera epidemic around Broad Street, Soho.

For his work in Soho and also for a similar, larger piece of research in south London, John Snow is known as the father of epidemiology, the branch of medical science that studies the incidence, distribution and determinants of disease. Epidemiologists are interested not in individual patients but in the wider, public health picture. Put simply, they look at who gets sick and why, and because they investigate sudden outbreaks of disease, they are known as the medical detectives.

In this atlas, we use statistics to plot the course of some of the pivotal and devastating epidemics and pandemics caused by the most virulent diseases across the centuries. The information is presented in a series of specially commissioned maps that bring the dry data to life in a way that lists and tables never can. Some of the maps, like the spread of the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic (see ). And alongside them are historical maps and illustrations showing how different diseases were viewed at different times in history and also how, through the ages, the authorities tried to instruct the public about how to protect themselves.

The accompanying commentaries explain the background to the routes on the maps the wars, the explorations and exploitations, the panics and the victim-blaming. The text also examines the medical and social contexts, in particular how doctors struggled to understand how and why people were falling sick and the attempts of different societies to make sense of the disaster that appeared to have hit them from out of the blue. In fact, the word epidemiology comes from the Greek, epi meaning upon and demos, the people so an epidemic is something that falls upon the masses.

There are some striking stories. There is the blame game that broke out at the end of the fifteenth century when syphilis first struck in Europe, with each nation holding another responsible for the disease. There are the heart-breaking seventeenth-century reports of the slave ships arriving in the Caribbean with their human cargoes decimated by dysentery. There are the prisoners in Newgate jail in the eighteenth century who agreed to be inoculated against smallpox in return for escaping the gallows. And there is the heroism of the young American doctor in the early twentieth century who acted as a guinea pig in the fight to control yellow fever and died in the attempt.

But this is not only the story of the great plagues of the past. Today, despite the extraordinary advances in microbiology and medicine of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the human race is still engaged in a hard-fought struggle against the deadly pathogens that, despite all the weapons now in our armoury, all too often seem to be one jump ahead.

In the 1970s, a young student considering a career in research into infectious diseases was advised against it. There was no point, his professor told him. Infectious diseases were now all but conquered: there was nothing left to do.

Sadly, the professor turned out to be horribly wrong but at the time his was a perfectly reasonable view. Thanks to vaccination and antibiotics, the killer diseases that had rampaged across the world for centuries, terrorising and ravaging entire populations, seemed finally to be on the retreat. In 1979, smallpox was officially declared eradicated from the globe and many people believed that the others were surely set soon to follow.

Forty years later though smallpox remains the only human disease to gain this distinction. And while others are tantalisingly close to being conquered, they have proved extraordinarily persistent, with some even staging something of a come back. Then there are the new diseases that emerge without warning and are able to traverse the globe in hours, thanks to international travel. Even more worrying is the growing resistance to antibiotics, by far the most effective treatment that we have ever possessed.

In 2002, a previously unknown type of pneumonia appeared in China. Severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, went on to kill over 700 people across North and South America, Europe and Asia. This new pathogen turned out to be related to the common cold, which has been with us for centuries as nothing more than a mild irritant.

Ebola was first identified in 1976 but the condition had attracted little attention, confined as it was to small outbreaks in Central Africa. Then in 2014, it suddenly burst its bounds, striking first in West Africa where it had previously been unknown, and then appearing in different parts of the world, including Europe and the United States.