The Go-Betweens
Andy Dobson

There are four good ways to get a disease.

The first is to grow it from within – via diet, lifestyle, or bad genetic luck – and find oneself afflicted with diabetes, say, or cirrhosis of the liver. The second is to take it from the air or water (influenza, cholera), and the third to accept it from a lover (a tender gift of herpes or syphilis, perhaps). The fourth – and the topic of this book – is to have it delivered to you, unrequested and undetected, by a third party: a middle man, a messenger, a go-between – a vector.

Consider malaria. If I have it, I cannot give it to you; the pathogenic microorganism Plasmodium must be pulled from my blood, flown through the air, and injected into your arm via a mobile hypodermic needle known as a mosquito. Malaria is not alone; there are many others like it that depend upon a go-between. Typhus is spread by lice; Chagas’ disease comes to us via bugs; the bite of a blackfly or your toe can cost you your vision.

In unwitting alliance with their pathogens, vectors have carved new landscapes of disease, bringing misery and death to all corners of the living world. This is their story.

But it is also ours, because it turns out that the unholy trinity of human, vector, and pathogen has been every bit as pervasive and influential in human history as its more familiar Christian counterpart. Vector-borne diseases have – through the habits of their vectoring go-betweens – drawn lines on maps, raised and ruined empires, wreaked social revolutions, and decided the fortunes of princes and paupers. Napoléon was beaten by yellow fever and typhus, not by Wellington and Blücher; the economic structures of Africa were shaped as much by sleeping sickness as by colonial desires; feudalism in Europe was broken by plague.

This book is about these stories and more, describing the ways that vectors have shaped, disrupted, and catalysed human affairs. Blending historical narrative with popular science, The Go-Betweens takes a biologist’s-eye view of history, explaining how and why these forms of disease have insinuated themselves into the past and present of human societies.