Over a hundred years have passed since Charles Creighton's A History of Epidemics in Britain was published. Then, epidemics of infectious diseases accounted for a third of all deaths in the British Isles, caused principally by familiar infections like measles, whooping cough, scarlet fever, and smallpox, as well as by a host of now unfamiliar conditions in Britain like plague, cholera and typhus. By the beginning of the twenty-first century,...