New book portrays history of innumerable plague pandemics

The Moral Contagion bok cover/HarperCollins India

New Delhi: ‘The Moral Contagion’ by Julia Hauser maps the history of the innumerable plague pandemics that have impacted human society since time immemorial.

Over centuries, humanity has witnessed several devastating pandemics, from sixth-century Constantinople and fourteenth-century Europe to Islamic Spain, seventeenth-century London, eighteenth-century Aleppo, and Hong Kong, Bombay, San Francisco, and South Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The book is a graphic history of plagues, an amalgamation of expansive research by Julia Hauser and wry, playful illustrations by Sarnath Banerjee.

In ‘The Moral Contagion,’ Julia Hauser has attempted to provide a history of the multitude of plagues, from Black Death to Covid-19, while simultaneously attempting to bring forth the ways in which different societies have dealt with these devastating pandemics. Humanity, by and large, has dealt with these overarching threats in similar ways.

Covid-19, the most recent pandemic, caused the deaths of several across the globe. India was among the worst-hit countries, with an enormously high number of casualties, especially during the second wave. The Covid virus has significantly altered the day-to-day lives of people — wearing masks, sanitising, social distancing, and isolating oneself have now become an everyday reality. “Since India was hit particularly hard by the Covid-19 pandemic, we hope that The Moral Contagion will be of interest to many readers,” said Hauser.

Published by HarperCollins India, ‘The Moral Contagion‘ by Julia Hauser will be released on 23rd February on SoftCover, ThePrint’s online venue to launch non-fiction books.

Julia Hauser is a senior lecturer in modern history at the University of Kassel, Germany. Among her publications are “German Religious Women in Late Ottoman Beirut, Competing Missions” and “A Taste for Purity: An Entangled History of Vegetarianism.”

Sarnath Banerjee is a graphic novelist. He has been a fellow of the Akademie Schloss

Solitude, Stuttgart; the Indian Foundation for the Arts, Bangalore; and the MacArthur Foundation. He has published five works of graphic fiction: “Corridor” , “The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers”, “The Harappa Files”, “All Quiet in Vikaspuri” and “Doab Dil” and several others in collaboration with historians.

Executive Publisher, Udayan Mitra, appreciating the book says, “Julia Hauser and Sarnath Banerjee have taken one of the most dreaded subjects of our time — that of pandemics — and turned it into a book that is at once illuminating and a joy to go through.”