The three plagues that swept across early modern Europe and Asia were not the first instances of epidemic disease in recorded history. But to many observers, they seemed apocalyptic. With their unpredictability, terrible mortality, and devastating economic, social, and cultural impacts, they challenged philosophers and laypeople alike to come up with new explanations for disease, even as society seemed to be collapsing around them.

Michael Rossi is a historian of science and medicine at the University of Chicago. He teaches about medicine, disease, and society from the 1500s to the present. His research focuses on the historical metaphysics of the body: how different people at different times understood questions of beauty, truth, falsehood, pain, pleasure, goodness, and reality vis-à-vis their bodily selves and those of others. He is the author of The Republic of Colour: Science, Perception and the Making of Modern America, which deals with; color theory, politics, and aesthetics at the turn of the century. His newest project examines ways in which linguistics, physiology, and philosophy came together to make new forms of medicine in the twentieth century. He has written for the London Review of Books, Isis, and Cabinet, among other publications.