The copy of "Rats, Lice, and History" that I own was published in 1963, and this was the 33rd time it had been reissued since first appearing in 1934. I can't imagine Dr. Zinsser's grumpily discursive, masterfully written, and ultimately profound biography of typhus fever ever going completely out of print.

Stylistically the only work I can compare it to is Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". Where Gibbon occasionally dipped his pen in vinegar and excoriated the Christians, Zinsser dips his pen in hydrochloric acid and savages all of the quaint human customs that have kept Typhus alive and thriving. He shows much more affectionate sympathy for the louse than he does for the General or the Politician.

In the interests of research, Zinsser carried pill boxes of lice under his socks for weeks at a time before taking "advantage of them for scientific purposes." He is not able to tear himself away from these little creatures and address the true subject of his biography, i.e. the typhus germ, until Chapter 12!

However, the journey to Chapter 12 is well worth taking because along the way, Zinsser wittily savages modern biographers, psychoanalysis, astronomers and physicists who "scamper back to God" (Biologists evidently are much less prone to being 'born again'), and of course, all of the wars that have given Typhus countless opportunities to murder lice and humans alike.

"Rats, Lice, and History" should be required reading for would-be writers for its style, would-be Generals for its lessons on how soldiers really die, and for anyone else who is interested in a passionate, eminently witty, one-of-a-kind history of medicine.

Less an actual treatise on the Title than it is a series of rambling anecdotal diatribes about the states of biography, of science, and how the two mix. While when this book was first published these subjects may have been new and interesting, the passage of time has rendered many of the contemporary references meaningless, and we are left with a book that has little real value. For an introductory text, find Andrew Nikiforuk's "The Fourth Horseman" instead.

I'd read this maybe 30 years ago and thought it was great then (I was about 15, so it's readable for younger people). It has survived the test of time. Readers have to remember that this was one of the first books written by a scientist for a lay audience, and that such "slumming" by scientists was looked down on by colleagues (an attitude that survived well into the '60s).

Sure, there are much better histories of plague & disease around now & obviously with more up to date information. Zinsser's book, though, is great for it's historical value--a window on a period when writers could drop greek and french phrases untranslated into their books and assume readers would know (irritating, yes, but I still enjoyed it). It also stands on it's own for the information, though I'd also read something more current for that.

Zinsser's book is hysterical (as well as an extraordinarily scholarly, lucid and well-written) review of plagues through history. It is also extremely interesting from the standpoint of science, as Zinsser speculates on certain bacteria and epidemiologies IN 1934. Zinsser's probably politically-incorrect comments about how No Wonder There Is So Much Jew-Baiting - The Hebrew God was a Particularly Vicious and Vengeful Deity Who Went About Smiting Enemies of the Jews in the Hinder Regions, and the Jews Weren't Such Lilies In Their Dealings With Others Anyway (my paraphrase, mostly, the "they weren't such lilies" is a direct quote) was, well, really funny. Zinsser's whole irreverant and chatty tone about such a deadly topic makes this book such a good read. He's also delightfully snotty sometimes ("saprophyte" is identified by a footnote, the text of which reads: "if the reader does not know what this means, then that is too bad."). The whole first quarter of the book, in which he debates with a literary colleague his right to write a "biography" of a disease is wonderful - an argument over whether artists should write about science and whether scientists should profess to know enough about the humanities to write "literature." When he discusses some of Kepler's erroneous assumptions about spontaneous generation - in a long, serious historical account on the evolution of "origin of life" theories, he adds a comment in the footnotes that reads: "It is to Kepler's credit, however, that - although one of the most eminent physicists of all time - he never wrote a book on God and the Universe." I think there's be a lot more people in Science if Zinsser had written a major's intro bio text. Good heavens! What would he have had to say about DNA?? Oh, and the history of typhus (the main point of the book) is excellent, too. This has got to be one of the most delightful reads in microbiology.