Includes bibliographical references and index.

Cities and countries engulfed by panic and death, desperate for vaccines but fearful of what inoculation may bring. This is what the world has just gone through with COVID-19. But as Simon Schama shows, through stories set in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it has happened before: smallpox strikes London; cholera hits Paris; plague comes to India. Threading through the scenes of terror, suffering and hope are an unforgettable cast of characters: a philosopher-playwright burning up with smallpox in a country chateau; a vaccinating doctor paying house calls in Halifax. But we are also in the labs when great, life-saving breakthroughs happen, in Paris, Hong Kong and Mumbai. "Foreign bodies" crosses borders between east and west, Asia and Europe, the worlds of rich and poor, politics and science. Its story carries with it the credo of its author on the interconnectedness of humanity and nature; of the powerful and the people.