Simon Schama: What History Teaches Us About Pandemics

Three years ago, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the world and left a deep imprint on society. But the gulf of panic, competitive vaccine research, economic impact, and confidence and distrust in medical science have already occurred. In his new book Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations (2023) the internationally renowned historian Simon Schama shows how the world has survived similar pandemics before. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries smallpox struck London, cholera its Paris and pestilence came to India. What can history teach us about good leadership in times of pandemic and viruses? How should we look back on the way we dealt with COVID-19? And how can societies prepare themselves for new viruses to come?