This book may have only just escaped being entitled "The Rat Race." A silhouette of a rat, not without a cute charm, adorns each chapter heading. But the bulk of the book's action concerns an outbreak of plague in Hong Kong in 1894, shortly before rat fleas were identified as the ancient disease's true vectors.
Whereas a hundred years ago books about battles that changed the course of history were in fashion, today we have books about breakthroughs in the early history of science, discoveries that advanced our understanding of the world we live in and where we have come from, if not necessarily where we are going.
There have been Simon Winchester's The Map that Changed the World (geology), Lucy Jago's Northern Lights (astro-physics), John and Mary Gribbin's Ice Age (the interpretation of landscapes), and many more. Now we have a book on the late 19th century struggle to discover the true nature of plague.
Hong Kong's was a major outbreak that led to a world-wide epidemic, reaching San Francisco six years later (where there were 122 deaths). The "race" that took place in the British colony was between a renowned Japanese bacteriologist, Shibasaburo Kitasato, and an unknown French doctor, Alexandre Yersin. Kitasato was for many subsequent decades credited with the discovery of the responsible pathogen, but Marriott unswervingly champions Yersin, arguing that it was he who identified the bacillus in the pus of buboes (the swellings accompanying bubonic plague), whereas Kitasato had found it, in lesser quantities, only in the blood.
Kitasato had from the start the logistical support of the Hong Kong authorities who were eager to show their superiors in London that they were employing one of the most high-profile scientists available to fight the contagion. As a result it was Kitasato's research results that got published first in the London medical journals.
The tale is told with reasonable gusto, plus a measured amount of speculative imagination. Where details are missing, Marriott tells us, he had to invent them. But because he doesn't want to appear to be distorting his material in order to highlight its inherent drama, he puts the parts he has invented into fictional form.
The result is that the book reads sometimes like a novel, sometimes like a historical account. There's nothing wrong with this. Tolstoy inserted great slabs of history and historical speculation into War and Peace. Sid Smith put details of germ warfare in East Asia between 1935 and 1955 into his compelling novel Something Like a House without fictionalizing them, and Lucy Jago admitted she imagined small parts of her Norwegian story when the historical account appeared incomplete.
And because Marriott wants to demonstrate that plague is by no means a spent force, he includes a substantial fictional sub-plot centering on the plague outbreak in Surat, India in 1994. He also has an entirely non-fictional chapter that looks at the pestilence in present day Madagascar, one of the four countries where plague is most prevalent (the others are Vietnam, Tanzania and Peru).
There's a history of the disease's sporadic outbreaks. It was called the Black Death in Medieval Europe, we learn, because the skin of the corpses was observed to be unusually dark.
The terrible social conditions in much of Hong Kong in the 1890s are highlighted. Even in nearby Guangzhou things were better, with 50 percent of plague patients surviving in more spacious hospital wards, compared with little more than 10 percent in the British colony.
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