The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – A History of the World in Six Plagues: How Contagion, Class, and Captivity Shaped Us, from Cholera to COVID-19 by Edna Bonhomme

Episode Date: March 19, 2025

A History of the World in Six Plagues: How Contagion, Class, and Captivity Shaped Us, from Cholera to COVID-19 by Edna Bonhomme Amazon.com Ednabonhomme.com A deeply reported, insightful, and literary account of humankind’s battles with epidemic disease, and their outsized role in deepening inequality along racial, ethnic, class, and gender lines—in the vein of Medical Apartheid and Killing the Black Body. Epidemic diseases enter the world by chance, but they become catastrophic by human design. With clear-eyed research and lush prose, A History of the World in Six Plagues shows that throughout history, outbreaks of disease have been exacerbated by and gone on to further expand the racial, economic, and sociopolitical divides we allow to fester in times of good health. Princeton-trained historian Edna Bonhomme’s examination of humanity’s disastrous treatment of pandemic disease takes us across place and time from Port-au-Prince to Tanzania, and from plantation-era America to our modern COVID-19-scarred world to unravel shocking truths about the patterns of discrimination in the face of disease. Based on in-depth research and cultural analysis, Bonhomme explores Cholera, HIV/AIDS, the Spanish Flu, Sleeping Sickness, Ebola, and COVID-19 amidst the backdrop of unequal public policy. But much more than a remarkable history, A History of the World in Six Plaguesis also a rising call for change.ABOUT Edna Bonhomme is a historian of science, culture writer, and journalist based in Berlin, Germany. She writes cultural criticism, literary essays, book reviews, and opinion pieces. Her writing explores how people navigate the difficult states of health—especially subjects that discuss contagious outbreaks, medical experiments, reproductive assistance, or illness narratives. She is a contributing writer for Frieze Magazine. Her writing has appeared in Al Jazeera, The Atlantic, The Baffler, Berliner Zeitung, Esquire, Frieze, The Guardian, London Review of Books, The Nation, Washington Post, among other publications.

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Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi folks, it's Voss here from the ChrisVossShow.com. The ChrisVoss Show. Ladies and gentlemen, there are ladies and gentlemen that makes it official. Welcome to the show. As always, the Chris Voss Show. His fan loves you, but doesn't judge you, at least not as that makes the official welcome to the show. As always, the Chris Voss Show. His fan loves you, but doesn't judge you at least not as harshly as the rest of the world

because we're nice people over here. Go to Goodreads.com for it says Chris Voss, LinkedIn.com for it says Chris Voss. Chris Voss won the TikTokity and all those crazy places on the internet. We always have the most amazing, brilliant, smartest guests. You'll always notice we never platform weirdness or conspiracy or nuttiness. The only nut here is me. As always, refer the show to your family, friends, relatives. The latest book that is coming out, March 11th, 2025, is called A History of the World

and Six Plagues, How Contagent, Class and Captivity Shaped Us, From Cholera to COVID-19. Edna Bonham joins us on the show with us today. We're going to be talking to her about her insights and some of the stuff she's written in this amazing new tome that she has. She's a historian of science, culture, writer and journalist based in Berlin, Germany. She writes cultural criticism, literary essays, book reviews and opinion pieces. Her writing explores how people navigate the difficult states of health, especially subjects that can discuss contagious outbreaks, medical experiments, reproductive assistance, or illness narratives.

She's a contributing writer for Freeze Magazine. Her writing has appeared in Al Jazeera, the Atlantic, the Baffler, Berliner Zeitung, I'm going to guess at that because I'm technically German, but from the 1800s. Esquire, they had different language back then. The Guardian, London Review of Books, The Nation, Washington Post, among other publications. She's a graduate of Princeton University's PhD program in the history of science. Welcome to the show. How are you, Edna? Edna Bohnem, PhD, PhD

I'm doing great, and thank you for having me. Pete Slauson Thank you for coming. We certainly appreciate having you. So, give us any dot coms. Where do you want people to find you on the interwebs? Edna Bohnem, PhD, PhD So, people can often find me or information about me on my website, w.ednabonom.com or

on Instagram, which is my last name Bonom. And yeah. So give us a 30,000 overview. What's inside your new book? The purpose of this book and what I write about is the history of modern epidemics and more specifically, six epidemics and how they've been fueled by forced labor, confinement and austerity. The book is a set of case studies, which to an extent try to give us an insight as to

how various outbreaks also coincided with different forms of captivity. So I look at cholera on the plantation, sleeping, and the concept of a concentration camp, HIV AIDS and how some incarcerated people dealt with that in a women's prison. And even thinking about the 2014 Ebola outbreak that happened in West Africa and how a certain neighborhood was in Liberia under a lockdown. So the book is historical, but it's also thinking about the ways in which literature has talked about plagues. It's a little philosophical at times, and there's also some personal memoir in it as well. Pete Oh, so it's a little bit of your story, your history growing up.

Stacey Absolutely. So, I start with myself, which I think Sigmund Harding would have a good day with that. Pete Are you the first plague? I'm just teasing. Stacey I am. So, I start with myself, which I think Sigmund's already had a good day with that. I'm just teasing. I'm just teasing. I am. Did your mother tell you that as a child? I think my mom said that to us as boys, as kids.

You guys are a plague. It's the first time we've called a guest a plague on the show. I'm one too. So, I think most people on the internet or on YouTube that comment on our videos also think I'm on too. So I think most people on the internet or on YouTube that comment on our videos also think I'm a plague. You explore these six plagues, cholera, HIV and AIDS, the Spanish flu, sleeping sickness, I didn't even know that was a thing, Ebola and COVID-19. Why did you leave the plague of stupidity that we're having in 2025 off the list?

Or was that just you always had the book to editing? So before we try to address that question, not loaded at all, I would first want to point out that as a person who's been trained in history of science, and also I have a degree, undergraduate degree in biology, I really wanted to take apart what an epidemic means both in as a kind of biological phenomenon, which I think is really important for us to flesh out, but also how it impacts people socially. And one of the things that's important to know is how endemic diseases when compared to endemic diseases, so endemic diseases can be anything from the cancer, high blood pressure,

and so forth. I wanted to show how contagious diseases really rattles people, both psychologically, physically, and otherwise, and how it can be considered to be a state of an exception. And so in thinking about how infectious diseases, particularly in the 19th century, have really shaped our society in so far that people were still figuring out, you know, how does disease prep? Does it happen because of divine intervention or through a microorganism? And so by beginning the book in the 19th century and carrying out in a period looking at the flu, I also wanted to highlight how people manage outbreaks in a moment where

they couldn't always find the appropriate treatment or in some cases where vaccines were not available. And part of what the book shows is that pandemics can kind of reveal broader ideas about trust, about misconceptions as to who is considered to be contagious, and also just like how we treat each other as a whole, and the ways in which people also find refuge in various capacities, whether it means finding refuge in one's home, or even just finding refuge by having some kind of solitude and so forth, or in some cases, providing mutual aid to each other when necessary. Pete Slauson

Mm hmm. What made you want to write this book? What fascinates you about this sort of topic? Jai Radha I would say that ultimately, I'm a curious person and I think that I hope that other people can be curious too when they read this book and trying to understand, you know, why do certain people trust science, why do certain people don't trust science, how has science as a discipline changed, not just from the ancient period to the modern period, but even in the past 10 or 15 years.

I think that it's absolutely fantastic that we've had innovations in gene therapy because the human genome has been mapped out. And beyond that, I think that it's such a cement to human civilization that we've been able to eradicate smallpox by virtue of having vaccination campaigns and so forth that have been able to give us the chance to really address a disease that has stricken people and caused premature death in the 19th and 18th century, but we've been able to eradicate it.

I guess the challenge for us, and this is why I wrote the book, is to figure out then if we've been able to do wonderful feats in the natural sciences, and more specifically microbiology when it comes to gene therapy, treatments for cancer, vaccination programs and so forth, how can we do better and be better on a global scale? What would it mean for us to not just have universal health care in places like Western Europe, so in the UK and Germany and so forth, but to do that on a global scale and redistribute sources so that whether you're in Baku or Kampala or Balcota, you can still have access to universal care and have a healthy and safe life.

And so looking at case studies and the states in which people are pushed to their limits and people are also pushed to their limits in health departments, I think it's important to also consider how we can prepare for the next pandemic. We definitely want to be prepared better next time. It was interesting to me how far off the rails people went with COVID. I mean, any sort of event that is hard for people to handle, 9-11, the blowing up the space, anything that's extraordinarily too much for people to handle, a lot of times they'll go into conspiracy theories and, you know, they have all sorts of different ways of coping that sometimes are quite interesting.

You talk in your book about how it seems to affect the poor and minorities more than anything else where they seem to suffer the most. There's's a line from Nature I wish I could quote it says something about that but the poor always seem to be the ones who bear the brunt of this you know you look at you look at the AIDS crisis in Africa during the what was it the 80s in the 90s it wiped out at least 25% of the population I think it was or maybe it was but it was significant enough that Africa was set to rise as the new nation of the It Nation, if you will. The resources on that continent are extraordinary and they were set to really come together

and then AIDS hit and really set them back generations with the amount of people that it killed and disabled, et cetera, et cetera. So I think you get into some of that, don't you? Yeah. So one of the things to note with the HIV AIDS epidemic is that, yes, it began in the 1980s and it has been responsible for about 35 million deaths worldwide as of 2016 and more than two-thirds of HIV cases currently happen on the African continent not by virtue of being wronged with Africans and

I want to point that out but rather the failure to redistribute on a mass scale antiretroviral medicines and medication and providing a robust healthcare system in countries that have been deprived of their resources, which you've alluded to, and this isn't a recent phenomenon, but if we think about the history and legacies of colonialism and how Europe underdeveloped Africa, it has meant not just health, but also education and other forms of infrastructure have been undermined. And what we have seen over the past several decades is that it impacts not just the HIV AIDS crisis in Africa, and not all African countries experience this evenly, but also other medical crises, whether it's Ebola, which I talk a little bit about in the book,

or I have a chapter on that, but also malaria is also something that disproportionately impacts people. We have the means to provide treatment. The science and the knowledge is present, but it's a question often of redistributing the sources and ensuring that people, no matter their background, no matter the country, can have access to medication and to build the preventative circumstances so that diseases do not emerge to begin with. It's a question of will and I hope we can be able to do that on a kind of global scale. Pete Yeah, it was interesting. I imagine you document in the book the same thing kind of happened with

COVID, where, you know, America had all these great medications that we're always spending oodles of money on, I guess. And, you know, countries like Africa and other countries that didn't have access to it, it became, you know, America first, we're going to save our people first. And, you know, I think like one of the strains, I believe one of the major strains came out of Africa because we didn't help them. It wasn't it that starts with an S, it was the strain of COVID that kind of made a second round. It kind of turned it into a whole second wind. I don't know if you get into any of that, but you know, it was kind of weird during COVID because you're like, we should, we should like help these other countries too, because this strain is going to, it's going to, you

know, make different multiple strains of itself. We should probably try and get them on the same program. Otherwise it's just going to, you know, there's going to be weirdness and stuff. I don't know if you get into that. I do want to point out that Africa is not a country because I think you said that Africa as one of the countries that had the outbreak. But one of the things that, and I point that out just to say that, and demarcate, that you're right to say that there were different strains of COVID that emerged in 2020 and 2021. And like any virus, viruses, because they want to be able to survive, often will mutate and replicate, or they replicate and

they mutate so that they can be able to live far longer because often our bodies will have immune response to fight off a virus. And so we had a witness or scientists who mentioned that the various strains that emerged were Omnicron, Delta, Alpha, and so forth. There was a period where some of those strains, the first cases would be found in specific places. So there was a strain that had been found in the UK that they called the Kent strain, Kent, England that is. There was a strain that was found and that was first detected in South Africa. But there was also strains discovered elsewhere with varying severity.

And it's important to note that finding a strain or detecting it in a particular place doesn't necessarily mean that it emerges there. In fact, that's something that I talk a little bit about in my flu chapter where I point out that sometimes historically when strains of a disease such as flu or in this case COVID have been found in a specific place it doesn't mean it necessarily emerged there. What it means is that the scientists and the people who are doing the work of trying to document the rise and fall of a disease are testing it out in ways that maybe it's not always

happening somewhere else. So I think it's also important to be careful around that label of place as being the sole origin of a disease or an outbreak. Pete Thank you for that correction because that's important to know. This is why we have you on the show. I learn more from our guests than, I don't know, maybe my audience members learn more, but I learned so much from the brilliant people we have on the show, like yourself, that do the research. It seems like in your career and going over the bio, you kind of have a focus on this

sort of thing. What draws you to talk about this, write about this, study this, et cetera, et cetera? Yeah, so I think that I'm very curious about the world as a whole, and I often feel that there's more for me to learn. And I would say that when it comes to the natural sciences, because it's constantly developing with respect to peer-reviewed research and so forth. There's a basic level of just being able to read the scientific articles and journal articles in which people have spent years of their lives trying to answer basic questions about how the body is able to change, how it's able

to respond to diseases and so forth. And I think that on that level, this is something that drives me to do the research and writing that I do. But then there's another level that as a human and as someone who loves to read, who's inspired by literature, I also want to see how people respond to that scientific work. Which is why in the book, I'm also thinking about cultural reception. I write about Virginia Woolf and the fact that she wrote Mrs. Dalloway, which is ultimately happening, a book that is set in the backdrop of the flu outbreak of 1918, 1919.

But I also think about how people who've been sick, who've been, have had to deal with cancer, such as Audre Lorde and Boyer, and so Susan Sontag, how they write about their illnesses and how they use their kind of education as philosophers to think about how the intimate lives of being a person who's undergone disease also shapes how we as humans make art, make literature, write poetry. And so because of my inspiration by the world, I'm also thinking about how science both helps to fuel and inspire art and how art also inspires science.

It's, you know, it's an interesting journey in how we've survived things. I think, you know, some of these ways that we choose to survive are kind of interesting. What do you think about the measles outbreak going on right now? I'm sure you're familiar with what's going on. There's actually a couple of people starting to die. They're kind of in some of these, I guess, weird cities or towns that kind of have a adverse thing to vaccinations. But to see measles start to come back and start killing people is extraordinary. Like I had to call my mom and be like, did I ever get my, did I ever get measles?

I can't remember if I did or not. I remember chickenpox. Yeah. So measles is a highly contagious infectious disease that has suddenly taken an uptick or a surge in 2025 with more than as of, you know, early March of 2025, with more than, as of early March of 2025, over 250 cases that have been reported across multiple states in the US with two confirmed deaths, one of those deaths being of an unvaccinated child. And even if someone doesn't die from it, it can lead to life-threatening complications if one doesn't have protection from the disease.

And part of what reduces the likelihood of having measles is by having vaccine, which being vaccinated against an MRR, which is measles, mumps, and rubella, which can have a 97% effectiveness. And of course, there are some people for whatever reason, such as their immunos, their immune system, other immunocompromised and so forth, that might not be able to get vaccinated. But for the most part, many people or not most people can. And because over the past couple decades, there's been a reduction of measles vaccination in the United States, some of which is due to mistrust of vaccination as a whole

and the rise of vaccine skepticism that is believed to be part of why there are less people who are protected, not just from measles, but from other things. It's somewhat of a public health crisis in that precisely because a disease that had been nearly absent from our kind of public life is now having a comeback. I think this is a moment in which it's up to, it's going to be the duty of public health officials, nurses, physicians, educators, everyday people to really think about the science of public health and its relevance and also the history of public health and how we can or should do better as to protecting people, not just as individuals, but on a mass scale.

And if people have doubts and are feeling distrustful, how do we answer their questions? How do we provide spaces so that people can learn more about not just measles, but other infectious and contagious diseases. Yeah, the death of expertise. I mean, it's really interesting how we've created this world where the people who are the smart, the smartest ones and trained to be smart, you know, they've gone to school, they've done the PhDs like you have and different things.

You know, somehow these people's study, experience, knowledge, true knowledge, let's put it that way, are somehow written by some mom in, I don't know, Pennsylvania, who, I don't know, just got off a crack binge and she thinks that, you know, science is bad or something, I don't know. And we're in 2025, that's what just kills me. I mean, COVID was interesting to watch. I don't think it helped that there was a leader of the country who was stirring conspiracy and stirring all sorts of weirdness instead of embracing science. But, you know, elections

have consequences, let's put it that way. But to see us fall into that and more and more, like, the conspiracies have just spread over COVID and vaccinations and all this sort of stuff. And you know, you talk to people that have an ass hat of knowledge or training in anything. It's like, what makes you have the ability to talk about COVID? I have a trailer home. So but seriously, I mean, we need to get back to where we respect people who know what they're doing, who are trained in what they're doing, who have legitimate

experience, who have legitimate knowledge and trust that more. I mean, I don't think we need to trust it blindly, but we need to trust smart people more because the dumb people are just running the show and it's fucking getting weird in these days. I don't know if you've seen the place lately, Edna, but it's getting a little weird around here. Yeah. So I think one thing I would say is that I would try as much as possible and I hope we

can as a society not talk down to people because it seems as if people don't often react great that way, but to really build community structures and programs so that there can be that space, so that people can trust scientific authority more and that scientists also feel comfortable and safe to know that if they are disseminating information, they're not going to go under, be attacked by certain individuals or groups. So it's a question of moving from the individualism that is very rife and open in the United States and towards something, a society where people feel like they have a collective responsibility for each other. Pete Yeah, the collective responsibility, I like that. And I mean, that's what we're doing during COVID, you know, wearing the masks and especially at the beginning, everyone seems to forget about the beginning,

where no one knew what was going on. And we were filling out body bags and trucks. There was a reason we did that. And some people look back on that and they go, look, got out of hand. The initial point was to keep the hospitals from overflowing. Like everyone seems to forget that. So anyway, give us your final thoughts and pitch out to people to order up the book as we go out. Any dot coms you want them to find you on? Dr. Hussain So before I say that, one thing I would also make the case for in the United States is that I hope that people can also strive toward having universal healthcare. That's one of the major lessons that we learned from the pandemic and that we should actually have a universal healthcare program in the United States.

But people can find me again on my website, www.ednabonhomme.com. And also I have a sub stack. So it's B-O-N-H-O-M-M-E dot sub stack.com. And the sub stack is called mobile Fragments. And there you can get information about my thoughts, my essays, book reviews, and also events that I'm doing in Europe and beyond. Thank you very much, Edna, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Thanks, Samanis, for tuning in. Order up your book wherever fine books are sold. It is called

A History of the World and Six Plagues. How Contagion, Class and Captivity Shaped Us from Cholera to COVID-19. Out March 11th, 2025. Thanks to all of us for being here. Go to Goodreads.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress, Chris Foss. Chris Foss won the Tik Tokity and all those crazy places on the internet. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time. And that should have us out.