Island Epidemics. By Andrew D. Cliff, Peter Haggett, and Matthew R. Smallman-Raynor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xxi, 563. $120.00.

Extract

Islands are natural laboratories for the study of biological phenomena in general, and diseases and epidemics in particular; their isolation makes them ideal places to study the biological and social processes that combine to cause disease patterns. Questions such as the minimum community size to permit continuous (endemic) transmission of a disease are ideally answered by isolated populations of varying sizes, and islands are an approximation to this. This is especially true historically, before fast ships and airplanes made islands less socially isolated. Island Epidemics is a tour d'horizon by three scientists whose prior work—much of it also as a trio—eminently qualifies them to survey this fascinating and important intersection of history, epidemiology, biology, geography, and the social sciences in general. The book is not only an assessment of the state-of-the-science of island epidemiology, but also an intellectual history of the subject, with accounts of how key breakthroughs were made, and by whom.