And we were just talking about Scalzi on another thread! I’m impatiently waiting for the next book in this series, loved Collapsing Empire.
I just finished a book called Get Well Soon: History’s Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them by Jennifer Wright (can highly recommend, it was very good). One of the plagues she describes is cholera and I found such a parallel there also. There was a doctor named John Snow (yes really) who essentially proved, or at least strongly suggested, that it was water-borne by tracing all the cases from an outbreak to a single water pump. (Londoners probably already know this story.) It was the era of the miasma theory, that people get sick from bad smells, and The Lancet ridiculed him. In fact, they kept on ridiculing him long after further outbreaks had been prevented by removing the handle on that pump and also telling everyone in London to boil their water. He wasn’t publicly exonerated until after he died, which IMHO is too late. So, even in the era before the pharma industry and malpractice insurance, the medical authorities were no good at admitting they’ve been wrong.
