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Previous Volume 357:1355-1357 September 27, 2007 Number 13 Next

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By Myron Echenberg. 349 pp., illustrated. New York, New York University Press, 2007. $48. ISBN 978-0-8147-2232-9.

When in his medieval masterpiece, The Decameron, Boccaccio pointed his finger at the infidel East as the cause of the "unpleasantness" that sent his storytellers wandering, he expressed the relentlessly popular explanation that epidemic catastrophes were caused by a corrupt "other." The consequence of this unyielding human prejudice has been unthinkable havoc and injustice imposed on scapegoated populations since antiquity. This was never more brutally the case than during visitations of the disease that defined the term pestilence and was the subject of Boccaccio's epic: bubonic plague.

Myron Echenberg demonstrates in this book that the attitude that prevailed during ancient . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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