As a child in 1988, Edna Bonhomme caught typhoid fever, and she was confined in Miami’s Jackson Hospital for several weeks. The sense of alienation from her family, friends and community has stayed with her for decades and is redolent in A History of the World in Six Plagues: How Contagion, Class, and Captivity Shaped Us, from Cholera to COVID-19. The language of captivity and reverberating violence of confinement is an integral part of Bonhomme’s book, in which she reveals systemic violence in public health, from plantations to the present.
Bonhomme focuses her research on cholera, HIV/AIDS, the Spanish flu, sleeping sickness, Ebola and COVID-19. Mixing historical research with thoughtful cultural analysis, Bonhomme’s frank, timely critique of the Western medical field and our faltering health care system reveals how it is deeply entangled with colonialism and capitalism. She writes, “Captivity is political, and it maps on to the many ways we already deliberately segregate society.”
Bonhomme recounts her parents’ departure from Haiti because of their opposition to dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier. They risked the perilous trek from the Caribbean to the U.S., where they became stigmatized due to the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. Perceived as vectors of the virus, Haitians were denied housing and employment. “Working-class Haitians found themselves marginalized four times over: They were Black and so belonged presumptively to the U.S. underclass; they were poor; they were migrants; they were marked out as diseased.”
A History of the World in Six Plagues is about not only stigmatization, confinement and captivity but also survival, resistance and liberation. Bonhomme writes, “Epidemics have been shaped by the history of forced captivity—one that began on the plantation, in medical experimental camps, racial apartheid, and continues in immigration detention centers and prisons. But in each case, those held captive have resisted. They have always made the choice to be free.”
