This is an essay written for submission to the science journal *Nature* in 2016. It was rejected, and since it was in response to a piece that originally appeared in *Nature*, I saw no reason to attempt to place it elsewhere. I am posting it now (January 2024), because it has become newly relevant to understand the London 6330 genome as…[Read more]

This is an initial “take” on the research design and implications of the findings announced, in pre-print, of the new aDNA Yersinia pestis genomes retrieved by Jiang et al. 2024 from the 7th-century mass burials under the collapsed hippodrome at Gerasa/Jerash, Jordan. The significance of this study lies not simply in presenting 8 new genomes fro…[Read more]

This is a Twitter essay on the history of leprosy, to commemorate World Leprosy Day, 29 January 2023. I’ve chosen for my theme this year the “bookend” discoveries of the two known species of bacteria that cause leprosy: that is, the discovery of Mycobacterium leprae by Armauer Hansen 150 years ago, and the discovery of Mycobacterium lepromatosis…[Read more]

This the revised draft of my essay, “The Pandemic Arc: Expanded Narratives in the History of Global Health,” which was written for a planned special issue of the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Science. The essay has been formally accepted, but has yet to undergo editing until the remaining submissions come in. Since this will no…[Read more]

This study presents my second major attempt to make historical sense out of the new evidence emerging from phylogenetics and paleogenetics about the proliferation of Yersinia pestis (the bacterium that causes plague) in late medieval Eurasia and Africa. My first attempt, “Putting Africa on the Black Death Map: Narratives from Genetics and H…[Read more]

This was an invited blogpost for the now-defunct blog on History of Medicine, REMEDIA. Published in 2015, the blogpost documents the revival and then transformation of written traditions in European surgical writing, at a time when a substantial corpus of new medical works were being absorbed from the Islamic world. The general barrenness of the…[Read more]

Glossing was an important element of medieval western manuscript culture. However, glosses are notoriously difficult to analyze because of their triviality, fluid nature, heterogeneity of origin, complex transmission histories, and anonymity. Traditional scholarly approaches such as close reading and the genealogical method often do not produce…[Read more]

This is the abstract and bibliography of works cited for an invited talk presented at the University of North Carolina – Greensboro on 9 November 2023. It was part of the Department of Biology’s Ashby Dialogue Series, devoted to the topic “Emergent Pathogens and Globalization: Past and Present.”