Professionals, students and all medical history buffs will be indebted to Socrates Litsios' new book Plague Legends: from the Miasmas of Hippocrates to the Microbes of Pasteur for providing an easy access to a treasure of information. This finely crafted, scholarly book traces the long 2000 years of western civilization during which philosophy, literature, and the arts flourished but medical science remained a confused, often dangerous, body of ignorance. Litsios' book presents an expert account of what the discovery of microbes and their pathogenic potentials meant to human health.Robert S. Desowitz, PhD, DSc (Lond.)Emeritus Professor of Tropical Medicine and Medical Microbiology, University of HawaiiAdjunct Professor of Epidemiology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill