Where to read more.
A short, hand-picked list — not a bibliography — for anyone who wants to go beyond any single article on this site.
Every article on this site links to its own specific References. This page is different — it’s a small, deliberately short list of general reading for anyone who wants a wider entry point into the history of epidemics, not just the topic of one piece. We’d rather point you to five things worth your time than fifty things you’ll never open.
A primary source to start with
Thucydides was there. His account of the Plague of Athens (430 BCE), in Book Two of the History of the Peloponnesian War, is the oldest detailed eyewitness description of an epidemic in Western literature — written by someone who caught the disease himself and survived. It reads as startlingly modern: symptoms, denial, social breakdown, the collapse of ordinary decency once people stopped fearing consequences.
Read it free at the MIT Internet Classics Archive (Book 2, sections 47–54).
Two good overviews
Huremović’s “Brief History of Pandemics” is a readable sweep from the Plague of Athens through the Antonine and Justinianic plagues, the Black Death, and on to the 1918 influenza — a solid map of the territory before you go deep on any one period.
Van der Kuyl’s “Historic and Prehistoric Epidemics: An Overview of Sources Available for the Study of Ancient Pathogens” is a more specialised piece, but it sits right at the heart of what this site keeps returning to — what kinds of evidence survive for ancient disease, and what each kind of evidence can and can’t tell us.
For browsing primary material
Wellcome Collection’s online collections hold an enormous, searchable archive of historical medical images, manuscripts and objects — plague doctor prints, quarantine certificates, hospital records — free to browse and mostly free to reuse.
For a broader map
Wikipedia’s “List of epidemics” is a useful index rather than a good read in itself — a chronological list you can scan to find the name of something you half-remember, then go and research properly.
Closer to home
Ancient Epidemics is one part of a small group of connected publications. If a particular article here sent you looking for the science behind ancient evidence, The Ancient BioChain is where that work actually happens. If it sent you thinking about disease governance today rather than in the past, that’s the territory of One Health Security.