In Ecclesiastes it does say, ‘there is nothing new under the sun’ and that certainly goes for pandemics. But the true value of history, properly deployed, is that it shows us things do change – sometimes for the worse but also for the better. Armed with that knowledge, and the knowledge of what can happen when things really go pear shaped, we have a fighting chance of doing better.

In The Great Mortality John Kelly gives us a well-researched account of the greatest pandemic in recorded history, the Black Death of the mid-14th century which killed at least one third of the population of Europe. He traces its spread from Central Asia (where it is endemic in the fleas that live in marmots and rats) to the Genoese port of Caffa in the Crimea, thence via Italy to continental Europe, England and ultimately as far as Iceland in a period of about two years.

Mid-14th century Europe was a world with no germ or virus theory, and where medical treatment was based on elaborate theories with no empirical basis. Battlefield surgeons could do remarkable work patching up valuable soldiers but if you caught bubonic plague it was just you and your immune system.

Inevitably, the punishment of God was invoked, religious hysterics in the form of the Flagellants roamed the countryside, and scapegoats – mainly Jews but also marginal women denounced as witches, were found and massacred.

Remarkably however, even in the large cities where mortality could approach half the population, social order rarely broke down, the crops were harvested and the dead were buried, sometimes with residual ceremony.

After the plague subsided Europe was never the same again. Wages rose and serfdom withered. Mechanical innovation flourished.

In his preface Kelly tells the reader he had planned to write a book about the next global pandemic and then got sidetracked while researching it. One can be pretty sure there is a sequel in the offing.

Reviewed by Grant Hansen