Epidemics and War: The Impact of Disease on Major Conflicts in History. Edited by Rebecca M. Seaman. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2018. 340 pages. Acid-free $94 (ISBN 978-1-4408-5224-4). Ebook Available (978-1-4408-5225-1), call for pricing.

This book is filled with interesting information about an important topic that has received scant attention in modern times, but how it should be used and who should buy it is difficult to judge.

The format is a bit of a mash-up. The coverage is not comprehensive, at least when it comes to all wars. Instead, diseases are presented individually in a series of essays about conflict in certain times and places, arranged in roughly chronological order.

The Battle of Bosworth frames a chapter about sweating sickness. Napoleon’s invasion of Russia is the connection to typhus. Even mumps makes an appearance as the focus of the chapter on the modern Bosnian war. The upshot is a reader learns a lot about the links between the given violence and the given disease, but less about how numerous diseases affected a particular war, or how a certain disease affected many wars.

Although the war and epidemics theme was pursued by early twentieth-century authors, the closest recent parallel to this volume may be Matthew Smallman-Raynor and Andrew D. Cliff’s War Epidemics: An Historical Geography of Infectious Diseases in Military Conflict and Civil Strife, 1850–2000 (Oxford, 2004). While this reviewer does not have access to this title, according to an online review at MedGenMed (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1681368/), the authors use “epidemiologic organizational methods and sophisticated biostatistical modeling [to] describe and analyze hundreds of major conflicts and their attendant sequelae in meticulous detail.” That work also features numerous graphic elements; the Seaman work has none.

Two twenty-first-century resources that touch on military matters in specific entries but are essentially about epidemics are Mary Ellen Snodgrass’s World Epidemics: A Cultural Chronology of Disease from Prehistory to the Era of SARS (McFarland, 2003) and the third edition of George Childs Kohn and Dr. Mary-Louise Scully’s Encyclopedia of Plague and Pestilence: From Ancient Times to the Present (Facts On File, 2008).

Each chapter in Epidemics and War includes endnotes, and there’s a lengthy bibliography in the back, along with notes about contributors and an index. Yet, as opposed to a reference book, this volume seems more useful as something to read cover to cover for those interested in either warfare or epidemics—or historical research. In fact, the editor opens and concludes the text with short essays about the challenges of such research on this topic. The book deserves a place in academic libraries and perhaps in large public libraries that give special attention to either military or medical history.—Evan Davis, Librarian, Allen County Public Library, Fort Wayne, Indiana