The Fevers Of Reason

"America's most interesting and important essayist." —Eric Kandel, Nobel Prize–winning author of The Age of Insight "[Gerald Weissmann] bridges the space between science and the humanities, and particularly between medicine and the muses, with wit, erudition, and, most important, wisdom." —Adam Gopnik In this diverting collection of essays, Gerald Weissmann looks back on decades of a career spent working at the intersection of the arts and sciences. The Fevers of Reason features some of his best and most representative works, alongside eleven new essays never before published in book form. Masterfully drawing from an array of subject areas and time periods, he tackles everything from Ebola to Eisenhower, Zika to Zola, Darwin to Dawkins, showcasing his singular contribution to humanistic science writing. Gerald Weissmann (August 7, 1930 – July 10, 2019) was a physician, scientist, editor, and essayist whose collections include The Fevers of Reason: New and Selected Essays; Epigenetics in the Age of Twitter: Pop Culture and Modern Science; Mortal and Immortal DNA: Science and the Lure of Myth; and Galileo's Gout: Science in an Age of Endarkenment.

"Bromley argues that standard economic accounts see institutions as mere constraints on otherwise autonomous individual action. Some approaches to institutional economics - particularly the "new" institutional economics - suggest that economic institutions emerge spontaneously from the voluntary interaction of economic agents as they go about pursuing their best advantage. He suggests that this approach misses the central fact that economic institutions are the explicit and intended result of authoritative agents - legislators, judges, administrative officers, heads of states, village leaders - who volitionally decide upon working rules and entitlement regimes whose very purpose is to induce behaviors (and hence plausible outcomes) that constitute the sufficient reasons for the institutional arrangements they create."--BOOK JACKET.

We have lived in a world that had, until the arrival in 2020 of the coronavirus Covid-19, not suffered a serious pandemic for a century, and society had almost forgotten the enormous impact created by highly infectious diseases. Infectious diseases, however, played major roles in ending the Golden Age of Athens, wrecked Justinian's plans to restore the Roman Empire to its former glory, and killed untold millions in Latin America after the Spanish invasion. Armies of Pestilence explores the impact of these diseases on history. Despite their importance, historians have tended to minimise the role of infectious disease - partly because of a lack of scientific knowledge, and this has resulted in a distorted view both of the past and of the danger of disease to modern society. In Armies of Pestilence, R.S. Bray, a distinguished biologist who here shows himself also to be an able historian, corrects this view. The book surveys the principal epidemics around the world and across the centuries, in each case discussing the origins of the outbreaks, the symptoms, the mortality rate and the social and economic effect. Where particular diseases cannot be identified with certainty the best scholarly opinions are discussed. Bray pays special attention to the infamous Yersina pestis, the organism that caused the Black Death. Other diseases discussed include malaria, smallpox, typhus, cholera and influenza, and AIDS. One of the themes of the book is the relationship between disease and war, with the former often causing more deaths than the latter, as was the case with the great influenza pandemic of 1918-19, at the end of the First World War. The inability of governments to deal effectively with disease is also made clear.