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A Historian’s Path 
An Interview with Professor Mary Lindemann, Former President of the American 
Historical Association and German Studies Association 
 
 
Nash Christian 
Central College 
 
 

 
 
I had the honor of talking virtually with Professor Mary Lindemann in May 2021. Professor 
Lindemann is a Professor of Early Modern History, German History, and History of 
Medicine at the University of Miami as well as the former President of the American 
Historical Association (2020) and the German Studies Association (2019). We discussed a 
variety of topics, including how her passion for history has driven her studies and career 
and pandemics in history. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 
 
Nash 
I'd love to start out by just hearing a bit more about yourself. What is your background? 
What got you interested in history in the first place? 
 
Professor Lindemann 
Well, I'll start with a little background, not that it's particularly interesting or exciting. I am 
the first person in my family to go to college and certainly the first person in my family to 
get a PhD or an academic job. I think that’s “historically” accurate, although I won't swear 
to this on a stack of anything. I am also, I believe, the first person in my family to graduate 
high school. People often ask me the question, “How did you first get interested in history?” 



4 
 

or “What motivated you to study history?” I've often thought about that question, and I feel 
that I don’t really have a good answer. Everybody says it was a good teacher or reading 
particular books. I had those good teachers and I certainly consumed a lot of books, 
especially novels. But I think that the basis for my interest in history goes even further back 
than that. And I think I have to blame my grandfather. 
 
My grandfather used to read both history stories and mythology to me. I like them both 
equally. At one time, I actually thought of becoming a classicist and the World Book 
Encyclopedia played a central role in my early “education.” The World Book Encyclopedia 
was something like the Encyclopedia Britannica, although it was also more pedagogical in 
tone and content, and it was a bit more directed toward self-education and self-
improvement. Besides the regular definitions of what crystalline substances were or who 
John I of England was, it also had stories. There were stories from Greek mythology. There 
were stories from Norse mythology. There were stories about the Napoleonic Wars. I don't 
mean just narratives but stories, like excerpts from War and Peace written at a level that 
made sense in the context of what the World Book Encyclopedia wanted to achieve. Our 
house was overrun with books. My mother and my grandmother were especially voracious 
readers of historical fiction, and I can remember my grandmother slowly wending her way 
several times through the entire multi-volume d’Artagnan histories of Alexander Dumas. So 
I was introduced to all of that world at a young age.  Although professional historians often 
sneer at historical fiction, it's not a bad way to start. I can remember a medievalist friend of 
mine who just loved Tolkien and all mythologies. So, to some extent, the process of reading 
and the facility with which I very quickly learned to read made it rather easy for me to 
become a historian.  
 
Nash 
I read that you had originally planned on majoring in pre-med or something medical, and 
during your undergraduate time, you decided to switch. Why? Was it just you loved history 
that much, or was it something else? 
 
Professor Lindemann 
Again, it's one of those things that when you go back and you try to reconstruct it, you can't 
find that “aha” moment. I think a couple of things came into play. I had a terrible time 
learning calculus. I was just dreadful at it. Organic chemistry just bored me to tears, 
absolutely to tears. I had a pretty good organic chemistry teacher, I think, but it just was so 
painful. Of course, I had to take it if I wanted to get into med school. These were the days 
when you had distribution requirements. You had to take a certain history course and 
English course. My history teachers were good. Some of them were a little weird as we all 
tend to be, but many were excellent. The decision to pursue history was not sudden; I just 
decided that I really didn't want to do organic chemistry and then analytical chemistry and 
then biology and biochemistry and then whatever else was necessary to get into med 
school. 
 
The other thing that happened was that, in college, I got very interested in the history of 
medicine. If you've seen my publications, you know that I've written quite extensively on 
history of medicine. The University of Cincinnati, which is my alma mater, had a very good 



5 
 

historian of medicine, who was quite famous with both a national and international 
reputation. He was weird, but he was interesting, so that allowed me to shift painlessly 
from medicine to the history of medicine. I think that a lot of people have very clear 
moments when everything changed. They experience something like a mental earthquake, 
and they decided, “I want to do this.” I don't think that was what happened to me. I dabbled 
a lot, but dabbling a lot isn’t a bad thing pedagogically. I took languages. I read a lot of 
English literature. I did some philosophy. I did some social psychology. I thought that I 
would use social psychology in studying history but decided that it was too reductionist. I 
can't even say in college that I was a particularly great student. I was a good student in 
many things and an okay student in other things. But the fact that I did read a lot of 
literature, I think, made an enormous difference in my life and in my career. 
 
Nash 
You originally were focusing more on pre-med, but then you decided to pursue medical 
history. What drove you to make a focus on history into your career? 
 
Professor Lindemann 
I wrote an honors thesis in my senior year, then went to graduate school, and I think that 
process, almost by osmosis, made me into a historian. I wish I could give you some really 
good intellectual reasons for my choices, but what I can say is that I was always curious 
about people and why they acted and thought as they did. History for me is about people, 
individuals not structures, decisions not trends. With the kind of broad basis, if also 
somewhat eclectic, liberal arts education I had, I could have done something else. I could 
probably have done literature. I maybe could have done philosophy. (I doubt it.) Becoming 
a historian also gave me opportunities that I never had when I was young. I was born in 
Cincinnati, Ohio, and I rarely had been out of Ohio until my late twenties. Graduate school 
gave me the opportunity to go to Germany, which was just wonderful. I spent a lot of years 
of my life in Germany. I love it! I love going back! My first real scholarly experience there 
was when I went to do my dissertation research; I almost didn't come back. I seriously 
considered staying in Germany and making my career there. Now I return to Germany as 
frequently as possible. 
 
I'm not sure I'd always admit this, but I think there's a lifestyle involved in academia as 
well. I don't mean a lifestyle like you see in lifestyle magazines, but rather a sense of how 
you want to spend your time and how you want to do your work. In the life of a 
professional historian, there's a lot of time you spend alone, staring at a computer screen, 
or in an archive freezing to death because nobody's turned the heat on. If you're not good at 
that, if you're not good at self-correcting, it's probably not a good life-choice. However, I'm 
pretty good at all those things. I remember one of my early professors said, “I like to file.” I 
thought “Oh god,” what happened to this poor guy to make filing the light of his life. Then I 
suddenly discovered that I, too, actually like to file, or at least like doing the organization 
necessary to write a good book, for example.  And, as weird as this sounds, I find it a 
creative not a mechanical activity. I like to move things around and rearrange them into 
new patterns. Of course, I do it now on a computer screen. 
 
Nash 



6 
 

You mentioned studying and doing research in Germany. What drove you to Germany to do 
your research? 
 
Professor Lindemann 
That choice actually was an intellectual one. Thus far, I feel like I have sounded very little 
like a “real intellectual” or scholar. I became very interested in Germany when I was in 
graduate school in the 1970s. Social history was, of course, the end all and be all at that 
time. That’s not so true anymore, but at the time (the late 60s and 70s), it dominated the 
discipline. There was a lot of interest in doing good and in writing history that would help 
change the world.  I am less sure of any of that now; however, it did make a difference at 
the time. Thus, I became interested in the history of poverty and poor relief. I found out 
that one of the first great municipal poor reliefs was created in Hamburg. It started at the 
beginning of the eighteenth century and then crystallized towards the end of the century. I 
thought, “Ah, nobody's worked on this yet.” Thus, I combined an interest in going 
somewhere like Hamburg, where I'd never been, with the thrill of looking at original 
sources that not that many people had worked on. That was my first book. That is one 
reason I went to Germany. Invariably, every German scholar, every German professor with 
a German name or family background is asked, “Did you want to study Germany because of 
your German roots?” No, not really. “Well, don't you want to look up your relatives?” No, 
not really. 
 
Nash 
I'd like to dig a bit deeper on the subject of archives and the physical manuscripts that they 
hold. Over the past few decades, we have seen a pretty steady transition to more digital 
databases, websites, collections, etc. Now, you can just look up sources on your computer 
screen and not have to go to a physical location. What do we lose with that transition? Do 
you think it's positive or negative?  
 
Professor Lindemann 
The Germans have a great word for this. It's called “jein.” It's a combination of “ja” and 
“nein,” yes and no. Look, there is no denying that in many respects, the digitization of 
sources has made research possible for people who could not do it before. It is particularly 
important and useful for people who are at small universities and colleges that do not have 
the resources and the superb library facilities of a Princeton, Harvard, Berkeley, or other 
premier institution. It makes it feasible for those people to do primary research. Even 
better, it makes it possible for students to do primary research in ways they never would 
have been able to do before these sources became so readily available. It also makes it very 
possible for people who have other obligations to do original research. People get married. 
They have children, buy a dog, acquire a house, or they don't have the money to go off for 
six months or a year to snuggle down in an archive. They can now do things in sources that 
they never could do before.  
 
However, there are disadvantages, too. I think some of the disadvantages are inherent in 
the way things are digitized, while some are misperceptions by the people who use digital 
sources. Remember that somebody (or several somebodies) has to make the decision about 
what gets digitized and what doesn't. There are many, many things left out of digital 



7 
 

sources. For example, you might digitize all the parish records for a small town. That’s 
great, convenient, and useful. Digitized serial records like notary records are wonderful 
because you can continually go back and check things. And then you have the complete 
archive (or a huge chunk of it) literally at the click of your mouse. For example, I've worked 
extensively in the notary archives in the Amsterdam archive, which are now digitized. It's 
very easy. I can just go back to those any time and play around with new ideas.  Little is 
missing even though it is never “all there.” However, for the vast majority of archives, when 
you consider the incredible volume of resources that we're talking about here, you can only 
digitize a certain amount, often a very small sliver. People pick and choose what they put 
into a digital archive. Now, let's not be silly about this. Archivists have always picked and 
chosen what is going to be preserved and not preserved. What's in the archive building or 
the archive collection is also a subsection and “someone’s” choice.  
 
However, people who work in archives go there and sit down and order up the documents 
and get the dust on their fingers. I think some students and graduate students make the 
mistake of thinking that digitized sources are “an archive.”  It's not the archive; it's part of 
an archive and a collection of some sources. It can be a very important, of course. The other 
thing that has happened, which I felt is also sometimes pernicious, is the business of using a 
camera to take digital pictures of documents. There's nothing essentially wrong with 
spending your archive time going “click, click, click,” although it is crushingly boring.  
Taking a digital picture of a document that is very important allows you want to go back to 
it when you need to do so. Often, however, one of two things happen to graduate students 
who take lots of pictures in the archives. One, they don't have what they really need, but 
they lack the time and the money to return.  Two, they don't use what they've acquired as 
pictures and have, therefore, wasted a great deal of time.  I think that taking pictures works 
best for people who already know what they're doing and specifically what they need. 
When I left the archive in Potsdam in the summer of 2018, there were some sources I 
needed to look at. I knew it was a vast collection, but I knew what I needed because I'd 
already done a great deal of work in other critical holdings. I sat there for a week and 
scanned things that I knew I wanted to evaluate. It wasn't just scanning every document 
that I thought I might use; I was scanning what I knew I needed. And, in fact, I’m probably 
not going to use every one of those documents or maybe not even a quarter of them. 
 
I also think it is very important for historians to go to archives. If you're working in 
someplace besides the United States, or even if you're working in the United States, it's 
important to be in the society in which these documents were created and preserved. I am 
working with some peculiar documents right now that are very fragmentary and that are 
written in the most horrible German imaginable. Terrible spelling. I don't think I would be 
able to do that now had I not gained, over many years, a facility with the language coming 
from speaking to people, not just reading documents. You thus learn a lot about the society 
and that's also important. The other reason is that you often read something in an archival 
document, and you think “That's interesting; I’d like to know more.” If you're staring at a 
computer screen in Houston, Boise, Chapel Hill, Sacramento, or Iowa City, what are you 
going to do? You can't follow that idea up without going back to the sources, that is, back to 
the archive. But sitting there in the archives, I can go pull out the inventory and pursue the 
lead right then and there.  This has happened to me many times and often totally reshaped 



8 
 

my project, and for the better. I stumble over something, then follow it up and the thread, 
the skinny little thread that I thought might just make for an interesting footnote, turns out 
to be a chapter or even an entire book. There’s another advantage to “doing time” in the 
archives. To make your time in the archives productive, you have to understand how it's 
been put together. You acquire that knowledge being there. Digital screen is digital screen. 
It all looks alike. Not that I don't use digitized records. I use them all the time. I spend half 
my life on the internet. I just think there's pros and cons and there is no single right way. 
 
The other thing all people who've worked in the archives have experienced is the first week 
of archival humiliation where you know nothing. I've worked in a lot of archives, so I sort of 
know how to “get around.” Yet every time I go into one, I screw something up. I've ordered 
something incorrectly; I've sat in the wrong seat; or I've sneezed in the wrong direction. 
Each archive has its own rules and etiquette, even its own quirks and foibles.  Some staff 
person invariably swoops down on me and says, “You can't do that,” like I knew. Once you 
get past that, you kind of become an insider, and you enjoy having gained a little expertise. 
It's fun, if it is also at times frustrating, cold, and uncomfortable. If you are unlucky, you 
have somebody sitting at your table who needed the bath about a week ago. Archivists run 
the gamut from extremely helpful and extremely knowledgeable to being pains in the 
posterior portions. 
 
Nash 
This summer I'm interning at an archive in a museum in Wisconsin called the Hoard 
Dairyman Museum. It deals a lot with agriculture, specifically dairy farming, but it's also a 
historical society for our local region. I would love to ask, what do you recommend are 
some of the things I should try and take away from working at an archive? 
 
Professor Lindemann  
Well, you'll certainly learn a little bit about the ins and outs of how archives function. Now, 
a small specialized archive is not the same as a big national archive, but that’s fine. That’s 
what it's supposed be, and you will still learn how archivists think and think about how to 
organize materials. The other thing you'll learn to do is how to find things. Finding things in 
archives is not always easy. If you start at a little one, it becomes clearer more rapidly. The 
bigger ones work about the same way. German archives are still organized by the Prussian 
system, and once you've cracked that, you kind of get it. Get the people who work there to 
show you how things are organized and how they make choices about what to save and 
what not to save. That makes you a better researcher and will really give you a lot of insight 
that will be very valuable to you, if you ever go on to do this more professionally. 
 
I'm interested that it's a dairyman/historical society and archive. Agricultural history is one 
of the most neglected and important histories that people just don't work on enough. It's 
tremendously important. Cows are important. Pigs are important. I don't just mean writing 
about how to feed pigs. For example, one of the best books I've read recently on medieval 
history and is titled Legions of Pigs, which demonstrates how absolutely critical swine 
were, not only to the food chain in the medieval world, but to the whole conception of how 
their world worked. It is fascinating. Who would ever think that someone could write a 
400-page history of pigs that's absolutely riveting?  



9 
 

 
Nash   
That is great advice and insight. I'd like to discuss your time as president of the AHA 
(American Historical Association). What has being the president of the AHA meant to you 
both personally and professionally?  
 
Professor Lindemann 
I remember when I was contacted by the nominating committee. I was in Germany at the 
time. They called me and they said, “We'd like to nominate you for president elect,” and I 
said, “Do you have the wrong number?” Then it slowly sunk in. Being picked by a 
nominating committee of people who are not just German historians or historians of 
medicine was a great honor.  
 
Being president of the AHA also gave me the chance to meet many people that I normally 
wouldn’t meet. I have connections with a lot of Europeanists and German historians. I meet 
a lot of early modernists. However, I don't normally encounter a lot of non-Western 
historians. I don't interact with people who work on Native and Indigenous people. It's not 
because I'm dismissive of them. It's that our paths rarely cross. As president, you also 
become extremely aware of various intellectual currents as well as the various political 
currents within the profession.  
 
It is a bit of an education at times; suddenly you think, “Whoops, I didn't understand that at 
all.” But that’s how you learn. You also see how the profession works. The AHA plays a 
great role in fostering scholarship and teaching, but it also is involved in advocacy. We have 
done a great deal of advocacy at both the national and international levels over the last two 
years. We worked to avoid history departments being closed and tenured faculty being 
fired. We also protested the harassment of historians and even imprisonment of historians 
throughout the world. We published a statement on Black Lives Matter, for example. That's 
the kind of advocacy work in which I, as a non-American historian, am normally less 
involved. I learned a lot about how the American government works. I was, of course, called 
upon for information on how the Polish government or the German government worked 
and how to address officials there. I got to know a lot of really wonderful people with 
incredible talents. That was another great benefit. The other thing is I met a lot of people 
whose ideas under normal circumstances I would think were really stupid, but who 
actually were not quite so stupid when you talked to them. I didn't necessarily agree with 
them in the end, but their positions were actually interesting and certainly worth thinking 
about. This came from both left and right.  
 
I also appreciated the chance to help people throughout their careers in history. I like 
helping not only beginners but also people at all levels in their career and encouraging 
them to think of things that would work for them and would make their lives easier and 
enrich their intellectual experiences. I learned all about the difficulties that independent 
scholars faced and the equally great difficulties scholars who are marginally employed deal 
with daily. In short, I gained a much broader sense of historians and historical scholarship 
that I had before becoming President. 
 



10 
 

Nash 
I would like to transition into talking about working with undergraduate students. In a 
world where academic subjects, such as STEM, have taken the forefront for a lot of schools, 
can you talk a bit about teaching the importance of history to the younger generations? 
 
Professor Lindemann 
I can start with what will seem a very ivory tower intellectual statement. A college 
education is not about acquiring skills; it's about getting an education. The sense of the 
value of a liberal education, in case you're unaware of this and I am sure you are not, has 
really shrunk. STEM is important. Science is important, math is important, engineering is 
important; all of those things are important as is, for that matter, acquiring skills. I'm not 
saying they're not, but they often impart a skill set, rather than a broad education. I'm a 
great advocate of a broad education. However, I can also make other arguments, and I'm 
sure you've heard some of these. One of the things we know is that people who come out of 
college with a BA in history get just as good jobs as people who come out with a degree in 
business. Critical thinking is something that the study of history teaches and that 
employers seek. 
 
I'd like to point out another good argument to use, not against STEM, but in discussions 
with STEM advocates. STEM is seen by many as the way that we're going to save the world? 
Climate change, increased production of goods and services, artificial intelligence, 
medicine, you name it, STEM is going to do it, right? However, if you think about this, you 
realize that the world's problems are not going to be solved only by technical measures. 
They’re going to be solved by convincing people to do certain things, and you're not going 
to do it just by science alone. Now, we just lived, and are still living, through COVID. There’s 
a lot of science out there. I love Fauci. However, he is not standing up there with a diagram 
of a virus. He's appealing to people’s social and human concerns. He's talking about how 
public health works. He's talking about how we all bear responsibility for others and not 
only for ourselves and our families. It’s better to get vaccinated with any one of the 
vaccines out there than not to if you don't want to get COVID. To convince those who argue 
that it is their “right to choose” to get vaccinated or not, you have to make arguments that 
appeal to them as human beings. As we have seen over the past months, it is not enough to 
say, “Look, science says...” We need to make stronger arguments about what's good for the 
community, what's good for your elderly parents, and what's good for your kids. Forced 
vaccinations have never worked very well, but in the current pandemic situation, there 
may indeed be a good reason to use stronger measures to persuade people to get 
vaccinated, such as needing a vaccination to go to work, see a movie, eat in a restaurant, go 
to school. You have to convince people that this is what they want, that it's good for them, 
for their kids, for their families, and for the society of which they are apart. That's not 
STEM. That's a humanist’s argument. 
 
Nash 
You mentioned “forced vaccinations” and how over history that has not been very 
successful. What other patterns or trends throughout history that can help us deal with 
COVID? 
 



11 
 

Professor Lindemann 
I wrote a column in Perspectives on History, the AHA’s magazine. I said, “Let's not write the 
history of COVID now.” We don't know enough; we need more distance. I think that’s very 
important. I think humanists know, or at least they should know, not to belittle other 
people's ideas. There's often a lot of misapprehensions of how people in the past behaved. 
If you understand how those misapprehensions of behavior in the past developed, you 
might have a little bit more sympathy and understanding of how to change things and how 
to move things in one direction or another.  
 
I can give you a very good example. In the eighteenth century, instead of smallpox 
vaccination, smallpox inoculation was the method used to combat the disease. In 
inoculation, you give somebody a real case of smallpox. There was a lot of opposition to 
this, although it seemed very clear that people who are inoculated had a much better 
chance of survival than people who weren't inoculated. There's all sorts of biological 
reasons for why inoculation is less dangerous, but people who looked at this skeptically 
said, “Yes, but people who are inoculated with smallpox get a real case of smallpox, which 
means they can spread it.” That argument was not illogical nor was it wrong. We hear about 
religious objections. Well, sometimes those objections are not religious at all but are based 
on knowledge and good thinking about a problem. Being a historian of medicine, I see this 
all the time. We look back at what people did in medicine before the mid-twentieth century 
and go, “Oh my god, the Dark Ages.” The kind of agony, the kind of inability they had to do 
anything for anybody except provide simple nursing care was just horrible. People think 
those people were stupid. I mean, who could believe that leprosy was caused by eating raw 
meat? Who could believe something so stupid like that? But they weren’t stupid. You need 
to understand why they believed these things. I think that's what history of medicine, well, 
history in general, can teach us.  
 
Nash 
This is a timely lesson. Most arguments that are going on around the world right now are 
worsened by hyper-partisanship and in-fighting. It's just the inability of people to 
understand that there are those who believe in different things, and it's for certain reasons. 
 
Professor Lindemann 
This is where history and humanistic study can make a real difference. You look at what 
kind of information you're getting and where it’s coming from. Everybody can have their 
own opinion, but not everybody can have their own facts. There's so much information out 
there (and this is one of the real dangers of the internet), and too much of it is misleading 
or simply wrong. Wrong information is dangerous. That's where having a broad humanistic 
education helps people discern what is good information and what is not and how to 
separate one from the other. I'm not necessarily saying history allows you to say, “We've 
seen this before.” Historians are terrible at prediction, but we can better understand how it 
works.  
 
Nash 



12 
 

You had mentioned earlier the distance we should have before we start writing the history 
of COVID. When we begin to write that story/history, what do you think that might look 
like? 
 
Professor Lindemann  
There is a lot of histories of COVID out there now. Unfortunately, nobody knows enough yet 
to write a history of COVID because there's not enough distance from it to allow for a 
historical perspective. We're right inside the epidemic. It's a good thing to write something 
about COVID as a current event, but not a good time to write a history of it. The history of 
COVID needs to be anchored carefully set within a larger historical framework, and people 
need to refrain from making facile comparisons with other epidemics and other disasters. I 
heard a good historian say “COVID is like hurricanes hitting 100 American cities at once.” I 
thought, “No, that's not right.” It's a complete false comparison. When a hurricane hits a 
city, not many people die, but a lot of buildings fall down. There is huge and expensive 
damage to the infrastructure Then it goes away. We don't know what the life span of COVID 
is going to be. We know it's related to SARS, but even if you look over the period of the past 
year or so, there's been a lot of change in our understanding of COVID. Scientists know a lot 
more about the virus. We all know a lot more about how it spreads. For a long time, we 
were all told to wear masks outdoors, and people said, “Oh, it's so confusing. It's so 
confusing because they say wear a mask, then they say don't wear a mask,” but the problem 
is that until you have enough information about it, you have to make decisions on the best 
knowledge you have at the time and that knowledge may be incomplete. That is what the 
public health authorities do. They make decisions and suggest ways of dealing with disease 
based on the best information they have. Mask wearing is a very interesting subject in light 
of the 1918-1919 Flu that killed 675,000 Americans. We have in the US now passed that 
number. If you look at pictures of cities during the flu of the early twentieth century, 
everybody's wearing a mask. We don't know what it looked like in rural communities, but 
what we have seen is that large numbers of people in cities anyway wore masks. They did it 
for a year and a half, so it is not so weird and bizarre, but rather prudent and useful.  
 
Nash 
COVID has really highlighted the role that disease really plays in history. Can talk a bit 
about role of disease in history, and how we should understand and teach that?  
 
Professor Lindemann 
The ways are so many ways and they are as complex as they are fascinating. It's hard to 
pull all of the strings together and select one thing that says, “This is the importance of 
disease in world history.” We know that epidemic and infectious diseases were the greatest 
killers until the end of the nineteenth century, then mortality patterns changed. Now we're 
seeing a resurgence in such diseases, but infectious diseases, as a whole, still don’t affect 
mortality as they did two centuries ago. COVID has killed nowhere near as many people as 
cancer, for example. There are a lot of books that have addressed just that issue.  In the 
history of medicine, there is no subject that has generated more interest and nurtured 
more books than epidemics. None. The reason is twofold. One is because a lot of people die, 
and epidemics cause a great deal of social and cultural, as well as political, disruption. Two, 



13 
 

it's the perfect laboratory for the historian, and not only the medical historian. That 
moment of disruption shows how our society works or doesn't work.  
 
For a long time, people looked at epidemics and said: “Epidemics disrupt society, society 
collapses, people don't do what they're supposed to do, people run away.” This was a very 
standard story in the history of medicine until fairly recently. Now, however, we're 
beginning to see that's not what actually happened or happens. Most societies pulled 
themselves together, continued to function, and created mechanisms for dealing with 
diseases; those mechanisms eventually became what we know as public health that is now 
considered a normal part of government. William McNeill, in his influential book on Plagues 
and People, talks about how important the thirteenth-century Mongol migration westward 
was for carrying plague out of its homeland somewhere in Wuhan, China. The plague 
transformed all sorts of societies that were impacted by it. Then there's John McNeill’s 
Mosquito Empires that analyzes how the empires in the Caribbean were transformed by 
epidemics. During wars of empire, epidemics were weaponized by non-infected or less 
susceptible people. They knew that almost all newcomers to the tropics died of yellow 
fever and malaria. Malaria is still a tremendous problem in the world today, but it's a social 
problem. It's a problem that is generated by changes in agriculture, cutting down forests, 
different forms of husbandry, and the presence of lots of animals, because cows and horses 
are also reservoirs for malaria and many malaria-transmitting mosquitoes. Many 
Anopheles mosquitoes prefer cows and horses and only bite humans when cows and 
horses die off. Such diseases present the historian and the epidemiologist with complex 
problems. I think the history of medicine and the history of epidemics go a long way to 
helping us understand the complexities of any given society. It's not simply that an 
epidemic killed a lot of people. Studying epidemics helps us understand how a society is 
put together and how society either continued to function or broke down. Climate changes, 
such as those we are experiencing now, also greatly affect how epidemics spread, and 
therefore environmental history and medical history often address many of the same 
issues. As it got colder in certain parts of the world with the advent of the Little Ice Age, 
malaria disappeared. I live in Florida, and with global warming, the mosquitoes are striking 
back. We have Zika in Florida and West Nile virus, which never bothered us before. Malaria 
is next. I think those are the ways in which the history of medicine has become an 
important part of the historical mainstream, especially for the early modern period. Early 
modernists cannot ignore the history of medicine. Modern historians, who are not 
principally medical or environmental historians, often still do, although I think COVID is 
going to have a real impact there. People are going to pay more attention to it. 
 
Nash 
Awesome! It has been super interesting and fun to talk with you. Thank you for your time! 
 
 


