Mark Harrison, a well-known scholar of British colonial medicine who has written histories of wartime public health, has never before stepped so far into the public spotlight. Over the course of a series of interviews with Shih-Pei Hung, Harrison carefully presents his experience of growing up in a working-class town and his longing for something better. By drawing a scholar from his academic armature and presenting his ideas as part of his own life story, the book offers new ways of thinking about a leading historian of science. The book is in three parts. In the first part, which is largely autobiographical, Harrison portrays the collapse of an old community in an increasingly commercialized world. Hung elaborates the statement that international trade is wrapped materialism, an ideology that must eventually destroy the norms and social values of small communities. As an adult, Harrison is aware of how the childhood experience of seeing his community transformed drove him to become a scholar. It now seems that the faster trade that brought so many changes to Britain's small towns undermined essential virtues and norms while hastening the transmission of diseases. Citing the super influenzas that have recently whipped around the globe, Harrison reveals the real motive that drove him to write his latest book, Contagion: How Commerce Has Spread Disease.
