Plague Writing in 
Early Modern England

By Ernest Gilman
(University of Chicago Press, 2009)

      In Plague Writing in Early Modern England, Ernest Gilman, a professor in the Department of English and a specialist in the cultural history of medicine in the Renaissance, surveys a wide range of literary, medical, and political responses to the three epidemics of the bubonic plague that devastated 17th-century England.
       Gilman argues that the 20th-century “triumph” of vaccines and antibiotics over afflictions such as TB and polio must now be understood as only a temporary remission in a long and tragic history of pandemic disease.
       “As we saw with this spring’s swine flu alert, we face the threat of new outbreaks against which our arsenal of drugs is of diminishing effect,” Gilman observes. “We have much to learn from the history of the plague.”