Rats, Lice and History: a New History of Human Destiny
About This Novel
This is a classic interpretation of human destiny that is both shocking and delightful to read. From the perspective of biology and history, the author Hans Zinsel tells the history of the changes of "infectious diseases", the main enemy of mankind, from ancient times to the 20th century. He started with the phenomenon of parasitism and clarified that infectious diseases are nothing more than a struggle for survival between different life forms. Taking typhus, an infectious disease that has caused huge disasters to mankind, as an example, he described in detail the occurrence mechanism, transmission routes and evolution history of infectious diseases, and deduced the tortuous process of the virus spreading from insects to animals, and finally to humans. Zinser deeply understood that infectious diseases had a huge impact on many important political and military events, thus shaping human history: the Athenian plague caused Athens to lose to Sparta in the Peloponnesian War; the infectious diseases that swept across the Roman Empire accelerated the demise of the Roman Empire; the difficulties encountered in the Crusades were not so much the military power of the Arabs as the infectious diseases; because of infectious diseases, the great military genius Napoleon failed to establish comprehensive hegemony in Europe.
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